T t

More interesting, especially in close elections, is the demographic structure -- the political geography, in a sense -- of Pennsylvania. The main population concentration in Pennsylvania is the Philadelphia metropolitan area in the southeast. The second-largest is the southwestern region that was originally built up by mining and manufacturing -- main city Pittsburgh. The rest of the state is called the T. This is not really a homogeneous area, including as it does the port of Erie, the state capital Harrisburg, Pennsylvania Dutch country, Allentown, and the Poconos, but it's a convenient term nonetheless.

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

Aviv is the Hebrew word for Spring (the season, not the hydrological feature; you realized this because I wouldn't capitalize just any noun). Putting all this together, we see that Tel Aviv could be Anglicized to Springhill. Actually, aviv has a more technical meaning associated with barley ripening, and gives its name to the corresponding month, starting around the time of the vernal equinox. Aviva is a common Hebrew woman's name.

The TAAS was instituted around 1991 by his Democratic predecessor Ann Richards, a woman best remembered for making fun of W's father at the 1988 Democratic Convention (I think that was it). It was sweet revenge for dad when W won that statehouse.

The TAAS is primarily an instrument of state educational policy, since various penalties and a few incentives are associated with schools' pass rates on the test, particularly at tenth grade and with particular attention to separately tabulated scores for blacks and Hispanics.

Steadily increasing scores on the test, and a decreasing gap between white and nonwhite students, have been called the ``Texas Miracle.'' This is not a complete fraud, since schools statewide have been feverishly ``teaching to the test.'' This has come partly at the expense of non-tested subjects (i.e., dumbing-down of curriculum to the level of the minimal-standards test, as well as shift of class time and other resources away from science, history, etc.), but it has also involved increased overall dedication to teaching, prompting the TFT to support the TAAS.

Most of the apparent steady improvement, however, reflects illegitimate factors. Independent authorities have found that the already-easy tests have been getting progressively easier. Strong indirect evidence for this claim is the fact that Texas scores on almost all other standardized tests have shown little or no improvement. In many large school districts, there have been suspiciously large increases in the number of students categorized as learning-disabled or non-English-proficient (and hence exempt from inclusion in test averages). There are indications that marginal students have been pushed into GED programs, where they do not count as drop-outs but also do not take the TAAS. In various cases that have been settled or are being prosecuted, it appears that test forms have been altered, good students' ethnicities reclassified, and scores simply misreported or not reported.

Some inconsistent correlations suggest widespread fraud, but perhaps the clearest sign that the numbers are being cooked is in the official drop-out rate, which the Texas Education Agency reports as having fallen from an annual 6.1 percent in 1989-90 to 1.6 percent in 1998-9. The latter figure is impossible to square with graduation numbers that are about 70% of enrollment numbers for the same cohorts in seventh or ninth grade.

For a bit more, including the article source of some of the opinions above, see the Mandate of Heaven entry.

     More effective for graphical browsers, and recommended in some HTML books, is to use a transparent graphic and control the space with the width parameter (define the height also, or some browsers will scale that).  One problem with the transparent-graphic approach is that unless you control the font size (and the client doesn't over-ride), all bets are off.  Another problem is that it doesn't work with nongraphical browsers.

What works:
Nonbreaking spaces (coded as   or  ). For example:
          
          
          
          
              
                  

Yeah, it's ugly, but it's fairly reliable. ``El que quiere celeste, que le cueste'' as they say. Also, if you want double-spaces after your periods, you can achieve that by inserting a   between the final punctuation and the white-space following it. (The double-spacing is primarily an English-language practice. It began as an attempt to reproduce in typing the slightly larger-than-normal spacing that typesetters use at the end of a sentence. The legibility-enhancing space is nominally one-and-a-half em's, I think. LaTeX has a declaration \frenchspacing to turn off this feature.)

Santoyo wrote then that ``hoy no se habla ... de la Mesa, sino de la Tabla Redonda...'' [`today no one speaks ... of the Table, but of the Round Board...']. Googling in January 2006, I found that ``mesa redonda'' was about 12 times more common than ``tabla redonda'' on pages with ``rey Arturo,'' though in pages that also include the word mort or morte, the frequencies are comparable. I wasn't going to take issue with Santoyo's judgment of common usage in Spanish; I was going to put it down to the passage of time and make the text of these two paragraphs an entry for the word melioration.

But first I had a look in Corominas y Pascual. The `table' sense of tabla cognates is common in Catalan, Gallo-romance, Italian, etc., not to mention French, though Portuguese and Galician usage is parallel to that of modern Spanish (i.e., Castilian). However, it turns out that in Old Castilian tabla at least briefly had the sense of `table' also. So I decided that the semantic movement was a bit too complicated, and this information became a tabla entry. Let no one say that there is no logic to the placement of entries in this glossary.

I don't know anything about it, but I do know this:

``A gentleman is never unintentionally rude.''

I think Osbert Sitwell (Edith's brother) said this, but I'm not sure.

Hmm. I guess I better have something to say about TACT after all. Okay: it's an extension of COCOA.

This is reminiscent of the problems that the Republic of Macedonia is having: FYROM.

To say nothing of former-republics-of the SU. And the basketball `Team Formerly Known As The Washington Bullets.' Now unknown as the Washington Wizards (!).

See also TAFKAC, TIFKAD, and HLN.

Qu'est-ce le Temps Atomique International (TAI)?
Le Temps Atomique International est une échelle pratique de temps destinée à être utilisée dans le monde entier. Le TAI est une échelle uniforme et stable; il ne suit pas par conséquent les légères irrégularités du mouvement de rotation de la Terre.

TAI is a weighted average of times kept by atomic clocks around the world (over 200 as of July 2004), computed by BIPM. It is estimated to be accurate to within a tenth of a microsecond per year. Cf. UTC.

Why is this entry alphabetized by definition instead of by headword?
Because yesterday a disk problem munged A.html -- that's why.

There, happy now?

Tailor asks, ``Euripides''?

Man asks, ``Eumenides''?

Name from Persian talk > Arabic talq > Old Castilian talco > Medieval Latin talcum. [Old Castilian evolved into New or Modern Castilian, the language called ``Spanish'' in English, and talc is still talco (q.v.), in Spanish.]

Mmm. Feels good on the skin.

Mmm. Feels good on the skin.

The usual flow of vocables between Latin and Spanish has naturally been from the former (and earlier) to the latter (and later). This word is one of the exceptions. Since Latin continued to be widely used for learned, ecclesiastical, and some official communications for centuries after Spanish and other Romance languages became established, there was a need to coin Latin translations of new terms. Because most of Romance vocabulary was derived from Latin, the natural way to fit new words into the Latin system (where all nouns must have a gender and a declension, and all verbs a conjugation, etc.) was by back-formation: creation of a word that would have evolved into the corresponding Romance form.

This was relatively straightforward for Spanish, because the original derivation from Latin was straightforward. In particular, most Spanish words ending in -o are masculine nouns (see LONERS) derived from Latin nouns of the second declension. Most of the original nouns in turn are masculine or neuter. Spanish, like all major Romance languages other than Romanian, retains only masculine and feminine genders, so neuter nouns were naturally collapsed into the masculine. [The Spanish noun forms represent a kind of consensus regularization of the more complex Latin system: the most common Latin singular form (for dative and ablative cases) ended in -o, and the accusative singular -um of classical Latin had a similar sound, since Vulgar Latin and even Late Latin dropped final m's.]

It is mildly interesting that in back-construction, the Spanish masculine talco became a Latin neuter talcum rather than a Latin masculine talcus. This is slightly surprising. It is true that gender is not always preserved when a word is loaned between languages, but it does tend to be preserved under conditions that apply here: the source language (Spanish) is well understood by the user of the destination language (Latin), which has available the readily identified gender, and preserving gender does not conflict with the morphology of the destination language. I can't think of any precise comparanda, but of some relevance is the word naranja (feminine in Spanish and French), whose ultimate form in English (orange) and French was influenced by a Latin neuter (aurum); see details at the adder entry. Possibly there was a preference for giving chemical substances neuter gender; elements named in the modern era generally end in -ium (neuter second declension in Latin) or -on (neuter second declension in Greek).

One of the main patterns of phonological change that occurred in the transition from Latin to Spanish is lenition, in particular the sonorization (a/k/a voicing) of isolated stops (labial p to b, dental/alveolar t to d, palatal k to g). This sometimes occurs initially (Late Latin cattus > Sp. gato, `cat') but is primarily intervocalic. Hence L. vita > Sp. vida (`life') and acutus > agudo (`sharp' in various senses). Sometimes the loss of an unstressed vowel conceals the fact that there was originally an intervocalic stop. Thus, for example, Latin aliquod gave rise to algo. So talicum could have given rise to talgo.

There doesn't seem to be much information on Oriol, but Alejandro Goicoechea was a designer who was willing to try some unusual tactics to reduce weight and friction. I guess Oriol put up the money. Over the years, Talgo has designed trains with variable gauge (since 1968) and the ability to lean into curves (since 1980), but the main constant feature has been light weight (notice the name). I'll fill in more details when I don't have to reorganize them every time I learn something new.

The epigram ``talking about music is like dancing about architecture'' has been attributed in a few forms to a few people, among them the avant-garde performance artist Laurie Anderson, her inspiration William S. Burroughs, and the singer Elvis Costello. Costello, at least, has denied paternity. One of the earliest attributions I've found is from April 8, 1987, St. Petersburg Times (Florida), in a review by Peter Smith of books about the history of rock'n'roll. He attributed the epigram (with ``writing'' instead of ``talking'') to Martin Mull. Mull is probably the most obscure person to whom I've seen it attributed, so I'd put my money on his being the neologist.

Tallahatchie Bridge was made famous by the early sixties song ``Ode to Billy Joe.'' It was reputedly a hit in Latvia (.lv). To this day, still no inquest into the doings that fateful day up on Chocktaw Ridge.

My friend Marvin used to sigh with an ostentatious ``sigg,'' but this was ahistorical. The ``gh'' used to be pronounced (when this was still a common sound in English) as /x/ (i.e., like the ``ch'' in loch or Bach).

Last time I talked with him, Marvin was studying Sanskrit.

``Aggie'' is derived from the Agricultural in A&M. Aggie is itself abbreviated Ag, with plural Ags.

The Texas A&M logo is ATM, with a large tee and kerning to give a printer fits.

• Torah (the first five books of the Bible, or pentateuch)
• Nevi'im (`prophets')
• Ketuvim (`writings' -- i.e., the historical books, etc.)

GENDER FAIRNESS ALERT:
The pronoun his above is not meant to imply that the suit is male. The suit may be female, or a eunuch of either sex, or both, or ... look, what I'm trying to say is, I don't care which bathroom he uses.

1. A Japanese word meaning `word.'
2. An old East Indian weight whose name, more commonly tang or tanga, survived as the name of one or another coin.
3. A Spanish flamenco dance, of Arabic origin. Tango was originally the Spanish word for a Gypsy (Gitano) or Moorish (Moro) dance festival. (See MILF for comments on Moro.)
4. A sexy and complicated Argentine dance, and the music that goes with it. (The accordion player should emote like crazy, so the camera has something to go to when the dancers fall over.) It takes two to tango because otherwise the woman would fall on her back and crack her head, and the man would look pretty silly gliding an air dance partner. The dance is punctuated with sudden stops, so it's a bit of a skill to keep time with the syncopated music and look half-way graceful. The dance is generally believed to be of African origin, but I think few people in Africa do ballroom jazz dance.
5. Latin `I touch.' First principal part of tangere, etymon of tangent.

I wonder under what name they market TANG in Latin America.

You know, I remember in the early days of feminist social criticism (until about 1973), how the party line was that girdles and bras and iron maidens were all tools of patriarchal oppression. Burn your bra! (Take it off first. Better yet, buy a more flattering size, and burn it.) Happy days are here again, I suppose.

In one of the increasingly loopy interviews hyping the release of the 2003 movie ``Troy,'' Brad Pitt (``Achilles'') predicted that it would soon be common for men to wear skirts. This is nothing. I'm waiting for the articles in men's magazines that explain how certain styles will flatter my figure. You know -- should I go the double-breasted look to appear more imposing? To correct for girlish shoulders, how much padding is too much? I've got a little too much tummy -- what to wear?! what to wear?!

Here's an ironic disconfirmation of Mr. Pitt's prediction: in Summer 2005, ABC aired a six-hour miniseries called ``Empire,'' putatively about the civil war that followed the assassination of Julius Caesar. It was comically anachronistic, and just wrong in places where it wasn't impossible. At one point, Octavius is shown lacing up his pants. What, no zippers?

Also, every so often the fire inspector comes around and demands that the hallways be cleared of these fire hazards. The obvious solution is to take the garbage back into the overcrowded lab. You'd love to call OSHA and have the accountants, firemen, and environmental experts duke it out, but you know they'd only shut down your project.

Journal catalogued by TOCS-IN.

Abbreviation used in cataloguing by TOCS-IN.

Tapuakh, `apple' in Modern Hebrew, has a less certain meaning in Biblical Hebrew. The Hebrew Bible refers at various places to tapuakh for a fruit tree and its sweet fruit, prized for its shade, etc. This unlikely to have been apple, because the apple was rare, not native, and had meager fruit where it did occur in Biblical areas. Various alternatives have been proposed (citron, quince, and apricot) each with its own botanical or historical problems. Fig and pomegranate are presumably ruled out by Joel 1:12, since this lists those along with tapuakh. There's also some ambiguous evidence from an Ugaritic tablet.

The Greek word mêlon, and malum and pomum in Latin, likewise evolved in the direction of increasing specificity, toward apple. Simultaneously, other fruit came to be called pomum de ambr', pomum bosci, etc., with ample apple etymons scattered across the grocery shelves of Europe. Interestingly, in Modern Hebrew potato is tapuakh adamah, reminiscent of the French construction (pomme de terre).

From the first issue (Nov. 1977) through September 1985, it was published in Bloomington, Indiana (by the Saturday Evening Club), where IU's main campus is located. Bob Tyrrell (R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.), who has always or virtually always been the magazine's editor-in-chief, was a right-wing provocateur or gadfly there as a student. (``Conservative provocateur'' sounds oxymoronic.) The editorial offices moved closer to the national political action in 1985 -- Arlington, Va.

David Brock was a prominent contributor with investigative pieces like ``The Real Anita Hill'' (March 1992, p. 18ff) The magazine had one or two splashy scoops in the way of Clinton scandal-mongering. (Didn't everyone? There was enough to go around.) Some time toward the end of the Clinton years, though, it ran into the ground; it was bought and completely remodeled for a different kind of audience that didn't happen to materialize. In the year 2001 a lot of marginal magazines folded (for another example, see the Zn entry). A year or so after that failure, TAS was refloated, again under Tyrrell's editorship. That's from memory; I'll have to check the details.

A political opinion magazine with a similar name but the opposite (left-wing) political, uh, view, is The American Prospect.

Oh, alright: it's a rorschach, but with black-and-white figures that are identifiably human rather than blotches. Created back in 1935 by Henry Murray and colleagues. The science of psychology has advanced so far in half a century that the test is now used in 1999.

There are also a Children's Apperception Test (CAT) and a Senior Apperception Technique (SAT).

Satellite phone link is higher-tech, but it has a major disadvantage: the speed of light is so slow that there is a noticeable delay in the transmission.

Members are informally called ``Tau Bates.'' For the next meeting, wouldn't it be cool if the conference venue were the Bates Motel? No, I guess not.

A glass case across from our Engineering Library entrance displays a number of framed and mounted commendations. A typical one reads

Okay, it's nice to know that the 2005 Convention is number 100, and I'm glad that we made the secretary happy. It's great to know that we won this commendation four times in the 1990's and all, but we need to find a more appropriate place to display this. Someplace less conspicuous, lest other chapters become envious, God forbid -- stranger things have been known to happen. The deserving people who actually made the perfect reports, especially if they have moved elswewhere, are the ones who deserve to have the commendations as mementos, to display in their own homes.

1. Brownish gray (brownish grey in the UK), or
2. grayish brown (greyish brown).

So many possibilities -- what a vague term!

``Now is the time to kill the `Taxasaurus' monster! Kill the dinosaur, kill him now! If you don't he's going to eat more jobs. So take this lead pencil and give him lead poisoning.

Kill him!''

Well, okay, Charles Shumer defeated D'Amato in the latter's bid for a fourth term in 1998. When Moynihan retired in 2000, he was replaced by his hand-picked successor, outgoing First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton. Although famously thin-skinned, she was scrupulously correct and modest in office. She was widely expected to pull a Cornelia Wallace for 2008, but the voters didn't cooperate. More precisely, the voters in the Democratic primaries cooperated, but she lost the delegate race to Mr. Obama's superior performance in caucus states and with superdelegates.

"The age of chivalry is past," said May Dacre. "Bores have succeeded to dragons."

The Young Duke (1831), bk.ii, ch.5.
-- Benjamin Disraeli

More on the passing of the age of chivalry at the calculator entry.

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

A total body workout is a set of routines to exercise the whole body, or a complete set of exercises or something. I don't think it can be regarded as an aggregation of workout for the whole body, and it's not very commonly referred to by the initialism TBW either.

A related disease caused by the same bacillus is scrofula.

Infection with Mycobacterium tuberculosis is extremely widespread. It is estimated that two billion people (or roughly one third of the world's population) is infected, that new infections occur at a rate of between 8 and 10 million per year, and about 2 million people die of TB each year.

Also expanded Tactical Ballistic Missile. I guess that lobbing one of these babies is mere tactics, while going intercontinental is strategic. I never really understood this terminology. Would that such knowledge were completely obsolete.

Hmmm .. theater tickets ... missive missiles ... it's practically the same acronym.

In March 1996, during the campaign for Taiwan's first direct presidential elections, the PRC test-fired ballistic missiles off the Taiwanese coast. Some of the missiles landed within sixty kilometers of Yonaguni (Japan's westernmost populated island). In a 1996 Joint Declaration of US President Bill Clinton and Japanese Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto, Japan agreed to provide the US with logistical support during regional ``contingencies.''

In August 1998, North Korea fired a three-stage Taepo-dong 1 missile over the Tohoku region of Honshu (Japan's main island). A Pentagon report leaked in 1999 estimated that since 1996, China had stationed 150 to 200 M-9 and M-11 missiles aimed at Taiwan in its southern regions. In the years since these incidents, Japan has increased its cooperation with the US on TBMD.

Also abbreviated B&B, the show has been running since 1987, when the lead character, Brooke Logan, was played by Katherine Kelly Lang, born (Katherine Kelly Wegeman) in 1961. As of 2011, she's still playing the same role (now Brooke Logan Forrester). I guess at some point you stop worrying about getting typecast and start worrying about getting wrinkles.

According to Chad's Wikipedia entry at the time I checked, ``[i]n the 7th millennium BC, ecological conditions in the northern half of Chadian territory favored human settlement...'' That was probably the last time.

TC was founded in 1887 by Grace Hoadley Dodge as the New York School for the Training of Teachers. Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler was appointed its first president, and that same year he created a laboratory for performing experiments on children, called the Horace Mann Lincoln Institute for School Experimentation (see HML). That school became independent of TC in the 1940's.

TC actually got the name Teachers College, already without the apostrophe, along with its permanent charter in 1892. In 1894, it moved to its current digs on West 120th Street, hard by Columbia University, and in 1898 it became affiliated with Columbia University.

The words MENS SANA IN CORPORE SANO are engraved high on the front of Teachers College at Columbia (on West 120th Street, facing south to Pupin Hall, which houses Columbia's Physics Department). You want to know what those words mean? Go to school! I mean, look it up. At the ASICS entry.

John Dewey joined the faculty in 1904. This was regarded as a good thing.

One of the girls who hung around with the hoodlum gang a friend mine belonged to (back in the day) used to be called ``TC.'' This name was never in the vocative case, or even within her earshot. I'm not gonna tell you what it meant, but it had nothing to do with technical committees.

This had problems, however. In particular, in the low-energy regime the Higgs field self-coupling approaches zero, so it doesn't minimize energy with nonzero vacuum expectation (remember your basic Landau-Ginzburg theory). This is called the coupling problem, naturally enough. Another problem is the hierarchy problem: the Higgs mass is sensitive to the full spectrum of all particles of any mass, which suggests difficulties when one finally gets to four-force unification.

One bright idea to address these problems is to suppose that the Nambu-Goldstone (symmetry-breaking, mass-generating) bosons are not elementary but composite. A simple way to produce these is from a fermion-antifermion pair, like the pions (u/u-bar, d/d-bar). In TC, the fundamental fields that replace the Higgs scalars are two-component fermions that also give rise to mass.

Extended TechniColor (ETC) is an extension of this scheme, designed to address the problem that t and b quarks are a lot more massive than u, d, s and c.

Don't ask me what that means.

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

Another source of approximation is that all modern textile mills are made to metric scale, and they typically have round numbers of threads per centimeter. Then 150 threads per cm would be 381 threads per in. Naturally, this number must be rounded, since non-round numbers feel rough and uncomfortable against tender customers' skin. Moreover, somebody is going to round 381tc up to ``390tc'' or ``400tc.'' In the absence of a legal requirement of exacting honesty, one can hardly expect other mills to label their equivalent textiles with the inferior-seeming ``380tc.'' Just hope they don't round to the nearest multiple of 500.

Alea iacta esto!

Okay, it seems that comment may be obscure. You may remember how, in the Prior item (not the prior entry; I mean the Arthur Norman Prior item), we talked about Julius Caesar and the Rubicon in a familiar way, as if it were a reference anyone should recognize. It's not that really, it's just a pivotal event in world history. The Latin phrase above is one guess (that of Erasmus) as to what exactly Caesar said as he crossed the Rubicon. (There are slightly differing reports of his precise words. The phrase given means `let the die be cast.' Another version, alea act est, means `the die is cast. Perhaps he said it in Greek.)

Anyway, to make a long story short, Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon was a signal act tantamount to a declaration of war (with the Senate, although that could always be smoothed over and talked away, and his sometime ally Pompey, who raised troops).

A degreasing agent and an HCl source for oxidation in IC manufacture, until its use was discontinued for ecological reasons.

A well-known version of this construction occurs in Aretha Franklin's cover of the song ``Respect.'' The song was written by Otis Redding, who recorded it in 1965; it charted #35 in the US. After Aretha Franklin's single ``I Never Loved A Man The Way I Loved You'' became a hit, Atlantic Records quickly arranged for her to record and put out an album (released under the same name as the hit single). ``Respect'' was one of the songs Aretha wanted to record. A number of changes were made to the lyrics, some necessary to change the perspective to that of a female singer. The lyric ``Take care, TCB'' was suggested by Aretha's sister Carolyn, who sang backup on the album. See the song's listing at the spelling in lyrics entry for more context. See also the entry for Sock it to me.

The TCC program provides up to twelve months of child care to working AFDC recipients upon loss of eligibility for AFDC due to increase in earnings from employment. The idea is obviously to diminish the economic disincentive to work provided by AFDC. TCC and AFDC-CC were created by Title III of the Family Support Act of 1988, Public Law 100-485.

``TCCS is a freely-available system to support what we call project control, a simple but powerful form of software configuration management. TCCS is implemented as a front-end to the two most common source control systems in POSIX-compliant environments, RCS and SCCS. TCCS provides a common command-line interface to both systems, and extends them by supporting multi-release, multi-user, multi-platform development.''

This is the WWWVL site for Tcl and Tk.

An interpreted script language. From the comments at whatis.com, I guess Sun supports it.

Oh! It's got an acronym, has it? Well, then -- it's legitimate.

Okay, maybe it's not that interesting.

Whaddaya mean, `and my first-born son'!?

Bill Hatanaka, ``Group Head Wealth Management, and Chairman & Chief Executive Officer TD Waterhouse'' at least as of May 2006, played four years of professional football with the old Ottawa Rough Riders and the Hamilton Tiger-Cats of the CFL, and was a member of the 1976 Ottawa team that won the Grey Cup Championship.

Joe Moglia, the CEO of TD Ameritrade. Before going into the financial services industry, he capped a 16-year coaching career as the defensive coordinator for Dartmouth College's football team. They say that this capped his coaching career, but in 2005 he published Coach Yourself to Success: Winning the Investment Game ``in which he explains the essential principles of investing.''

I think TD has really fumbled in not sponsoring any football team.

Drop-kick me Jesus through the goal-posts of life!

Oh wait, I think that's Australian football.

• SHDA: Síndrome de Hiperactividad y Déficit de Atención (ADH Syndrome)
• TDA
• TDAH: TDA con Hiperactividad (`ADD with Hyperactivity' -- ADHD)
• THDA (q.v.)

Back in the day, you'd mark an exposed rotating part (a fan-belt sheave mounted on the crankshaft, say) with chalk and adjust ignition timing with a strobe light that was in sync with the spark. Nowadays, with electronic ignition systems, the internal microprocessor adjusts timing, and when the timing is off you replace the computer. My 1990 Honda didn't even have a timing chain either: it had a toothed belt. And, of course, instead of a fan belt you've got an electric-powered fan that's activated according to engine temperature. The older engines were more mechanical and more interesting.

Cf. Latour-de-France, Le Tour de France, and Lance Armstrong.

The 1998 race came to be known as the ``Tour de Farce,'' after the Festina team car was found packed with drugs and needles.

Although the English word exploit and the Spanish word explotar are cognates that appear to have experienced similar semantic drift in recent years, their meanings do not quite coincide. Explotar does not refer to just any kind of profitable utilization. The kinds of mining done at Telluride qualify. For more on explotar, see the miga entry.

Tellurium. Atomic number 52. The heaviest chalcogen, unless you want to count elements with no stable isotopes. Now there are two such elements: polonium (Po), in the same group but nominally metallic (the pure stuff is a p-type semiconductor) and the element provisionally known as ununhexium (barf).

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

Back when I used to work at Fermilab and other places where the wearing of radiation-monitoring badges was standard, I always heard stories about the guy who left his lab coat in the beam tunnel overnight, and how, after tag monitors were developed at the end of the month, an ambulance was sent to pick him up at home. Good story, anyway.

Fosse was balding and self-conscious about it, and derby hats were about as common on his dancers' heads as on Bolivian Indians'. He thought his hands were ugly, and white gloves were a frequent part of his and his dancers' costumes. He was slightly pigeon-toed, and sure enow, an exaggerated knees-together stance is part of Fosse's gestural vocabulary. Fosse also liked to use a splayed fingers. What personal deformity explained that?

See also the drip.

Venedikt died young. Too bad he could not take advantage of SARG.

Notice that the first Tears ingredient listed is mouthwash. According to a news item reported by CourtTV.com, mouthwash was the reason a woman in Michigan was charged with DUI after an automobile accident on January 9, 2005. She rear-ended a car at an intersection, and an officer at the scene observed that she appeared intoxicated. According to the officer, she failed a breathalyzer test but denied consuming any alcoholic drinks. She did say, however, that she had drunk three large glasses of Listerine. Spit it out! You're not supposed to swallow it! The arresting officer also found an open Listerine bottle in the car. According to the news item, Listerine brand mouthwash ``contains between 21.6 percent and 26.9 percent alcohol.'' (Is that by volume or weight? At room temperature, 22 wt.% is equivalent to 27 vol.% alcohol in water.)

The problem of widespread alcoholism did not end with the collapse of the Soviet Union. In a study published in The Lancet on June 15, 2007, it was estimated that the drinking of alcohol not meant for internal consumption (``surrogate alcohols'' like cologne and antiseptics) may account for nearly half of all deaths among working-age men in Russia. This simply extrapolates the 43% rate found in a thorough study of death among working-age men in Izhevsk, a city in the Urals. Dr. David Leon, of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, led a study that examined all deaths of men aged 25-54 in that city from 2003 to 2005. They also interviewed the men's closest relatives for information on the men's drinking and smoking habits, socio-economic class, etc. The study showed that the consumption of surrogate alcohol was the strongest predictor of mortality. Men who consumed it had an approximately six-fold greater mortality rate than men who didn't.

TEA-21 is the principal US transportation law at the federal level, superseding the similar ISTEA (1991). A notable feature of ISTEA continued in TEA-21 is the use of MPO's to provide local official input to funding decisions.

What, you wanted to know About technical documentation, as such?

What we mean by ``technical misnomenclature'' is technical terminology whose construction betrays what turned out to be a misunderstanding of the thing termed. So ``technical mis(by-reason-of-initial-error)nomenclature'' might be regarded as a better and more precise term. However, considerations of awkwardness or unwieldiness must be taken into account when one is not writing German. Without further ado, here's the complete and unabridged list of technical misnomenclature that I can think of offhand:

1. abscisic acid
   
   This is a chemical that regulates growth in plants. It is primarily involved in seed maturation (promoting storage-protein synthesis and preventing premature germination) and in leaves' water budgets (causing the closure of stomata). It was named for its supposed role in abscission (separation of a leaf, fruit, or other part from the body of a plant). It is no longer believed to play a role in that process.
2. leopard
   
   A contraction of words for lion and panther (from the Greek léôn and párdos). The leopard was thought to be a hybrid of the two; presumably the spotted appearance was supposed to arise from the different colors of the lion and panther. You wonder why it didn't occur to the Romans or Greeks whether this inhomogeneous mixture of hide colors did not occur in other crosses. [The giraffe was once known as a cameleopard. At least in this case the (double) compound did not reflect speculative genealogy but merely a descriptive reference -- the general shape of a camel and the spots of a leopard.]
3. malaria
   
   This disease name is an Italian compound meaning `bad air.' It was originally applied to the air of marshy districts of Italy. That air was thought responsible for various febrile diseases (including those to which the term is now restricted, which are known to be caused by protozoans of the genus Plasmodium). Perhaps the term isn't too far off, if you admit the mosquitoes that air holds to be one of its properties.
4. oxygen
   
   Lavoisier introduced the word oxygine in 1778 to designate the element we call, not so coincidentally, oxygen. Recognizing that there was such an element represented a major advance, since the dominant theory of what we call oxidation had been based on a complementary substance called phlogiston. (Phlogiston was a hypothetical component in what we now regard as unoxidized substances. For example, the calcination of metals, in which metals are heated and combine with atmospheric oxygen to form metal oxides, was regarded in the phlogiston theory as the heat-induced release of phlogiston from the metal. As Lavoisier was not the first to point out, the increase in weight of the solid is somewhat telling against this theory.)
   
   Lavoisier made a great advance by reinterpreting Priestley's isolation of ``dephlogisticated air,'' though he discovered less than he thought he had. He believed that the newly isolated element was the essential ingredient in all acids. Hence the name, from oxy (`sharp,' as in oxymoron, from `sharp' + `dull') and -gen. The term introduced in 1778 was principe oxygine, which Lavoisier used interchangeably with principe acidifiant, `acidifying principle.' The first term was nudged toward the more etymologically faithful principe oxygène by 1786, and the noun use of oxygène is attested by 1787.
   
   Oxygen is indeed an element in most of the compounds regarded as acids in Lavoisier's time, but there were exceptions. The main exceptions were the hydrogen halide solutions -- hydrochloric acid [HCl(aq)] and such. This acid was known as muriatic acid, and Lavoisier supposed that the muriatic ion was itself a compound of oxygen with some other as-yet-undiscovered element. (Chlorine gas had in fact already been isolated by Scheele, whose name for it corresponds to `dephlogisticated marine acid' in English. The corresponding term in Lavoisier's nomenclature corresponded to oxygenated muriatic acid.) Davy isolated chlorine by his own methods in 1810 and recognized it as an element, giving it the name chlorine. Nevertheless, Lavoisier's idea that the muriate radical was a compound was influential for a long time.

Thus, when the university web-page has a link labeled simply ``Technology,'' rather than something a little more specific, like ``Information Technology'' or ``the limited information-technology resources provided by the university for student use but wholly inadequate for research,'' that is arrogation and buffoonery. Similarly, when I receive instructions for requesting classroom space for next semester, and the instructions contain the statement ``[n]ot all classrooms have technology in them,'' that is a flatfooted error, about as bad as the misspellings in announcements for the too aptly named self-improvement courses. Thank you. Please save this information somewhere, preferably in your brain.

It seems others have noticed the problem. The preface of Edward Tenner's Our Own Devices (Knopf, 2003) begins ``Technology appears to have become a synonym for electronic systems. It should not be so. Just because microprocessors are all machines does not mean that all machines, even all important machines, are built around chips and circuits.'' [The book is subtitled ``The Past and Future of Body Technology.'' It's about clothing, shoes, helmets, ergonomic chairs, and the like.]

In October 2007, it was reported that a 28-year-old Virginia man had broken the US record for most tee shirts word at one time: 183, in sizes from S to 10XL. The world record remained at 224. The report said he ``donned them.'' I want to know how many he was able to put on by himself before he needed help, and if he took them off with a box cutter.

You might still remember the incident on a Southwest Airlines flight from Columbus, Ohio, to Tampa, Florida, which took place on Sunday, September 30, 2007. A man sitting in the last aisle was told by a cabin attendant that he had to change his tee shirt. It was a novelty item that described the wearer as ``Master Baiter.'' He bought it in the Virgin Islands. The airline later apologized. (The man was from Largo, Florida, where five days later a man used his clothes to steal a puppy.)

The TEEU is the largest engineering union in Ireland & the second largest in manufacturing representing up to 45,000 workers. The TEEU represent a broad range of workers throughout industry and public service. The TEEU in its membership includes:

• Craftworkers
• Technicians
• Specialists
• Skilled operatives
• General workers
• Technical, administration, supervisory & managerial staff

Pat Schroeder, then a witty US congresswoman (D-CO) is known for coining the phrase that led to the epithet of ``the teflon president'' for Ronald Reagan. Here is its genesis, as reported by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on April 6, 1988.

She was frying eggs on the morning of August 2, 1983, and as she slid the eggs out of the frying pan,

she reflected on the way political accountability, in her view, slid off of President Reagan.

``I said, `He's just like this pan','' she recalled last week. ``Nothing sticks.''

Members of Congress may start the day's session with one-minute speeches, and this is how Rep. Schroeder started hers that day: ``Mr. Speaker, after carefully watching Ronald Reagan, he is attempting a great breakthrough in political technology--he has been perfecting the Teflon-coated presidency.''

So in origin the phrase did not slip smoothly but dangled, yet the teflon epithet did stick. (Actually, a fundamental difficulty with teflon coating is that it is intrinsically difficult to get teflon to stick. In that connection, see the razor's edge entry.)

You remember how Monsieur Jourdain felt, when he discovered he'd been speaking prose all his life and hadn't even known it? (If not, read the 40 entry and come back.) Well, now you can have a freebie like that too. It turns out that you've always known that teflon is an abhesive, and you never even knew that you knew it!

In the announcement, I included the following apt ``quote'':

Quasi Caesar: Gallium est omne partitum, inter radicis tres.
              (The Chemical Beam Wars, Book I)

There was some discussion of this (and some more, but poster John Price-Wilkin is now elsewhere) on the CAAL mailing list.

Here's an old posting on TEI.

The Modern Hebrew words t'lulit (`hillock'), talul, (`hilly'), and the word talil, `lofty' that appears in the Targumim (as you can imagine, here I'm cribbing here from Brown-Driver-Briggs) suggest that the original root was tav-lamed-lamed. Arabic and Syriac cognates are biconsonantal, although an apparent Old Aramaic cognate is triconsonantal (tav-lamed-yod). The evidence suggests that the Proto-Semitic root was triconsonantal, but that the two final ells converged, or assimilated if you can call it that, in a case where the vowel between them was a shwa. (This is what it suggests to me. In the compressed style of Brown-Driver-Briggs, perhaps it was considered too obvious for comment.) The question is where and when, and possibly how, that change took place.

It's been suggested that the two-consonant word was borrowed from Assyrian. Assyrian is an East Semitic language that was heavily influenced by Sumerian (a non-Semitic language). The loss of aleph, ayin, and back fricatives (excellent consonants to lose, if you ask my throat), and their replacement by vowels, severely compromised the integrity of the triconsonantal structure of the language. Assyrian was written using Sumerian script, though among the scribes there some knowledge of the alphabetic script used by the Phoenicians, and apparently some awareness of the originally triconsonantal basis of Assyrian. But if tel was borrowed from the Assyrian tilu, it was presumably borrowed from Assyrian speech.

I was born the day before my grandfather's birthday; my father sent a telegram: ``HAPPY BIRTHDAY GRANDPA I WAS BORN YESTERDAY STOP''

One should be alert for those rare opportunities that allow one to realize a figure of speech.

There's a stretch of road near the Princeton University campus that is closed for a day or so each year. The story (I have not confirmed) goes that this action is legally required to demonstrate continued interest in and ownership of the road by the university. If it's true, maybe they could just delegate someone to drive slowly in a wide vehicle, answering everyone with ``Yes, as a matter of fact I do own the road!''

It's been quite a few years since I was born. Does anybody really still use telegrams? ``Marge'' has also gone somewhat out of fashion (which is probably why Homer Simpson's radical-beehive-coiffed wife is named Marge). In any case, any Margaret can always call herself by the etymologically mysterious ``Peggy.'' In the circumstance, there's no point in holding back for a more opportune moment to release the following palindromes:

Telenovelas are rarely open-ended, as American soap operas typically are. The earliest telenovelas aired once or twice a week and ran for a year or less. Today they typically last 120 or 150 episodes, airing 5 or 6 times a week for half a year. This difference is probably the main reason for not treating `soap opera' or `prime-time soap opera' as the English translation of telenovela, and for instead simply borrowing the Spanish term. I've also seen the loan translation ``ópera de jabón'' used in Spanish.

For someone like me, who has watched a total of perhaps 3 or 4 hours of telenovelas on Univision and Telemundo in his entire life, the duration of a series is not noticeable or usually even knowable. If you want a broad survey representing, for all I know, millions of hours of viewing, see the Wikipedia entry. Following are just the salient features from my own perspective.

Most of the actresses and many of the actors are, as in American soap operas, very attractive. The hair tends to be more luxuriant. I was surprised to see waist-length, smooth, bottle-blond hair, on a man, in a historical (Colonial-era) show, but I think he was supposed to be an Anglo. Some of the characters (particularly the less gorgeous older men, I guess) are conveniently rich and powerful. Big surprise there, too. Personal servants of various sorts -- chauffeurs, valets, etc. -- figure in the stories as they do not, I think, in US soaps.

A frequently-used sound effect is the thunderclap. When I first noticed it in El Diablo de los Guapos, I thought it was a distant gunshot or explosion. It's used as punctuation when someone receives shocking news or a revelation. If they're not careful with the timing, some actress is bound to seem as if her jaw fell open because she was shot in the back. As in American soaps, the background noise is either feeble or unnaturally absent. It's particularly noticeable, of course, during the breaks between atmospheric music and scripted speech.

A feature I was pleased to see much in absence was the common daytime-soap practice of people speaking to the backs of others in the foreground, so both can face the camera. Maybe this reflects the fact that showing someone your back is a greater social provocation among Latins. Then again, it might be a diachronic thing. Screens are getting wider; I haven't seen an English-language daytime soap in a while, and maybe the trend is now to spread actors' heads further apart (sounds surgical, no?) so they can speak while facing forward or almost forward beside each other.

Cleverly or perhaps just sensibly, on at least some telenovelas, the episodes (Spanish translation: los episodios) are called capítulos, `chapters.' A major subgenre of telenovelas is set in the colonial era. These shows are striking because they are like and unlike US westerns. On one hand, horseback and coaches are the main forms of transportation apart from feet. Along with the clothing and scenery, they immediately remind one of westerns, the main US genre featuring horses. On the other hand, westerns are set in the US West during a relatively brief period of rapid expansion and proverbial lawlessness. The Mexican genre represents a more settled civilization. One immediately wonders why so few movies, never mind TV programs, are set in the American East during the long era before the introduction of the automobile.

This evening an attractive young woman asked if she could have my home phone number. With flat affect, I just said ``no.'' She doesn't usually get no for an answer, but she saw the humor in the situation and her smile broadened. I was paying with cash anyway, but I'm sure she realized that I'm the kind of guy who doesn't follow the crowd; I'm classy, even if I do dress like a homeless person. I've got to shop more often at K's Merchandise; they make me feel like a rock star.

In the US, the busy signal should be 480 and 620 Hz interrupted at 1 Hz. Normal ringing should be 350 and 440 Hz, 2 seconds on, 4 off. Ten rings is a minute. Hang up already! [Unless you have automatic camp-on.] Cf. RG.

Lookee here. And this site too.

I know what you're thinking, but no, it's not a political party.

Once a woman in a library paused and needed help pronouncing Chaminade. ("Shah-m'NOD," secondary stress on the first syllable, of course.) I didn't want to embarrass her, so I didn't add that -- as everyone else recalls -- the biggest upset in college basketball history took place when the No. 1-ranked Virginia Cavaliers, with the No. 1-ranked college player Ralph Sampson, were shocked in Honolulu by little Chaminade, an 800-student NAIA school. Chaminade player Richard Haenisch recalled

Nobody knew how to say our name. They thought it rhymed with ``lemonade.'' Then you heard people say, ``Yes, Virginia, there is a Chaminade.''

The historic game took place on December 23, 1982. What many regard as the pivotal play was an alley-oop to Tim Dunham. Haenisch, now a broker in Los Angeles, recalled ``Dunham said he was 6-1 or 6-2. He was 5-10.'' (For more on lying about heights, see the recent photograph entry.) Twenty years later, Dunham is the pastor of the Greater Faith Missionary Baptist Church in Pittsburg, California, and I'm tempted to list that church in the nomen est omen entry. He doesn't discuss his height, but he does say this:

Every once in a while you meet people who ask me what I did, and I make mention of that victory. And it's ``Oh yeah, I remember that.''

You know, there really isn't any such thing as a French language. What they do is, they sprinkle some accents on English words, scramble the word order a bit, and pronounce it funny. Basically, it's just bad English.

Cf. franglais.

An explanation of his revolutionary brushless AC motor is given in Jack Foran's ``The Day They Turned The Falls On: The Invention Of The Universal Electrical Power System.''

[E]quals is in quotes above because different electromagnetic units correspond to different systems of equations. In general, one does not directly measure a quantity like magnetic field or even mass, but measures, say, the motion of a charged or massive particle and derives the field or mass from an appropriate equation. Although any given set of equations is equivalent to any other, the relations between various quantities differ by multiplicative factors (typically factors of four pi between rationalized and unrationalized systems, and dimensional factors like c as well). In other words, the statement the ``one tesla equals 10,000 gauss'' should be interpreted in the following way: if the magnetic induction (B_rMKS) in a rationalized-MKSA description has a magnitude of 1 tesla, then the magnetic induction (B_cgs) in cgs-Gaussian units has a magnitude of 10⁴.

There are no excellent descriptions of the situation that I am aware of, but a good explanation, covering the most popular systems to a greater or lesser extent, is given in Jackson

TESOL is one of those few organizations that is not a US college or university but that has an .edu domain name. After launching a new site at the their .org domain, they stopped updating the .edu site.

If four atoms (``nearest neighbors'') are at a constant distance from some other (``central'') atom, while the sum of the distances (or squared distances) among themselves is maximal, then the four neighbors are arranged at the corners of a tetrahedron, at equal distances sqrt(8/3) a from each other, where a is the distance from the central atom to any of the nearest neighbors. The angle between any two neighbors, measured from the center, is the ``tetrahedral angle'' Arccos(-1/3) ~= 109.47° ~= 1.910633 radians from each other.

Maximization problems like this (sometimes called ``dictators on a planet'' problems) are quite difficult to treat analytically or generally in cases where the number of points whose separation sum is to be maximized does not equal the number of vertices in a regular solid.

Bible purchases go up in bad times. I suppose you could put them in your portfolio as an anticyclical hedge. To judge from this CNN article, Bible sales rise ten to twenty percent during recessions.

TeX is a bit inconvenient to learn, but equivalent functionality is available nowhere else. Also, unlike the equation editor in Framemaker, it won't leave you raving in anger, usually.

The most vicious swordsman of text-critical combat was A. E. Housman, and it's surprising I don't have a good example of his rapier wit eviscerating some inferior prior editor of Manilius, say. I'll have to find some later. (For an example of his general cattiness, see Housman, A. E.) I only came here to give an example from Samuel Johnson...

In 1744, Sir Thomas Hanmer published an Oxford edition of Shakespeare's works. It came out in time for Samuel Johnson, who was writing Observations on Macbeth (1745), to add a section to it of Remarks on Sir T.H.'s Edition of Shakespeare, which included this nice bit, which I can only think to call an extended paralipsis:

Surely the weapons of criticism ought not to be blunted against an editor who can imagine that he is restoring poetry while he is amusing himself with alterations like these....

The above is based on J.A.'s communication with Antreas P. Hatzipolakis, quoted in Anopolis.

• E. Fermi, ``Un metodo statisco per la determinazione di alcune prioprieta dell'atome,'' [A method for the determination of some properties of atoms], Rend Accad. Naz. Lincei, 6, 602-607 (1927).
• L. H. Thomas, ``The Calculation of Atomic Field,'' Proc. Camb. Phil. Soc., 23, 542-548 (1927).

Numerous improvements have been suggested over the years, principally to incorporate exchange effects. [Or exchange and correlation effects, since TF has traditionally been compared to Hartree-Fock (HF) theory.] For a thorough review of Thomas-Fermi theories, see Elliott H. Lieb: ``Thomas-Fermi and Related Theories of Atoms and Molecules,'' Reviews of Modern Physics, 53, 603-641 (Oct. 1981).

In 1960 or 61, Edward Teller proved a surprising theorem, that under naïve TF theory there was no binding of neutral molecules. Despite the nonbinding theorem, TF theory eventually turned out to play a rôle in proving the stability of matter (not that the stability of matter was ever much in doubt, but one wanted to know that it is guaranteed within the quantum formalism we use).

The logical continuation of Thomas-Fermi theory is in electron density functional theory (DFT).

Gee, the number of gospels is proliferating. In the Summer of 2002 the Bible Review has an article by Charlie Hedrick on ``the 34 gospels.''

Much later, a more `rigorous' derivation was given by Julian Schwinger in Phys. Rev. A 22, 1827 (1980), obtaining the same coefficient of Z² in the correction.

Texas teachers do not have collective bargaining.

In many other countries, the area codes (or ``city codes'') are distinguished by the fact that they begin in zero (wait long enough after the zero without entering another digit and you get an operator). You omit the zero if you're dialing in from out-of-country.

TRU is one company mentioned here with the TGP area code.

This page has some pictures and speed records. The Washington University of Saint Louis electronic picture archive has a number of jpegs of French high speed trains:

• 580 × 397 jpeg, 99kbytes (tgva.jpg)
• 790 × 404 jpeg, 87k (tgvawr1.jpg)
• 572 × 387 jpeg, 91k (tgvawr2.jpg)
• 580 × 385 jpeg, 83k (tgvawr3.jpg)
• 768 × 358 jpeg, 141k (tgvawr4.jpg)
• 355 × 323 jpeg, 54k (tgvpse1.jpg)
• 569 × 394 jpeg, 95k (tgvpse2.jpg)
• 384 × 570 jpeg, 74k (tgvpse3.jpg)
• 567 × 387 jpeg, 74k (tgvpse4.jpg)

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

Its area is 16,171 sq. km. The population in 1997 was about 2.5 million. The capital is Weimar. Thuringia is in the part of Germany that used to be East Germany, but it went out of existence as a separate state in 1934 and was only reconstituted following reunification in 1990.

At Eats 'n' Sweets, an ice-cream-and-pizza place on PA-611 in Scotrun, the garbage bins say

           _________  ________ 
          |  TRASH  ||  FEED  |
          | MONSTER ||   ME   |
          |_________||________|

               THANK  YOU

That's how it is: with the big chains you get consistency. With the independents you get personality.

I suppose that there's a lot more material, particularly moving-image material, available for WWII than for earlier historical events, but the prevalence of WWII programs must reflect some editorial decision-making as well. THC could probably put together a pretty substantial retrospective on how the war went in Vietnam -- wouldn't that be fun?

As you can tell from the wussy punches I'm landing, my heart isn't really in the task of lampoo--er, I mean writing a glossary entry for THC. The truth is that THC is my favorite TV channel, and in recent years I probably haven't gone more than a semester without watching at least a half hour of it. It's a shame I didn't watch any TV during the week that Nielsen had me fill out a diary; I'd've been happy to contribute to their statistics.

As long as I'm here and I'm not contributing anything useful, I might as well unload my burden of opinions about the popular presentation of nonfiction in general. I'm not going to discuss news, since I'm still getting over a cold and I don't think my stomach could handle that.

(This bit is under construction, see?)

Let's take a moment here to recall Lyndon Johnson's alleged comment about Gerald Ford -- that he was so stupid he couldn't walk and chew gum at the same time. This was widely reported when Gerald Ford was appointed US Veep, replacing ``disgraced former Vice President'' Spiro Agnew, and again when he assumed the presidency, replacing disgraced former president Richard Nixon (and again any time news cameras caught the athletic president stumbling). You could claim that Ford advanced because of his personal virtues, but that wouldn't be the complete story. Later it was revealed that the chew-gum version was a bowdlerization, and what LBJ had really said was that Ford couldn't fart at the same time. (Later yet it turned out that the retailer of the revised version was unable to provide a source for his claim. But what does evidence matter? Details at the Veep entry.) People seemed to think that the earthier version was more demeaning to one or both of the former presidents, but they're wrong. Was it walk-and-fart or chew-gum-and-fart? I forget. Either way, it may require careful sphincter control with simultaneous control of nearby (walking) or other GI-tract-related (gum) muscles. Now look, if you're not interested in the larger point I'm trying to make, you could read something else about reporter language competence or something else about the accidental president.

(To be continued.)

The sum of the square roots of the sides equals the square root of the hypotenuse, according to the scarecrow's acceptance address.

Square root of the ratio of power in all harmonics (or very commonly for audio, all harmonics up to 20 kHz) to power in signal.

More at the TDA entry.

Thirty centuries ago, as history emerged from the mists of ancient legend, an Athenian hero named Hekademos owned some land about a mile northwest of Athens. He donated the land to the city for a park, and over the years it was developed into a center for religion, sports, and education. In 388 or 387 BCE, a former playwright and politician named Aristocles established his own school in that park. Aristocles was better known by a nickname meaning `broad' or `wide,' which may have referred to his being broad-shouldered or to his having a wide forehead. The Greek root for `flat' and `broad' is related to the English word ``flat'': plat-. Aristocles was called Plato.

The park where Plato taught was named Hekademeia, and eventually Akademeia (these names seem more similar in Greek than English). Plato's school became so famous that eventually, Akademeia (our word Academy) came to refer to his school and his followers.

1. AOTBTY (All Of The Best To You)
2. ATB (All The Best)
3. ATG (Albert The Great -- no, not Einstein)
4. ATG (Alexander The Great)
5. ATM (At The Moment)
6. ATWT (As The World Turns)
7. BTW (By The Way)
8. COTF (Classroom Of The Future)
9. DSOTM (``Dark Side Of The Moon'')
10. DtB (Down The Back)
11. DtF (Down The Front)
12. DWTC (Down With The Clown)
13. FITL (Fiber In The Loop)
14. FLOTUS (First Lady Of The United States)
15. FOTA (Future Of The Alliance)
16. FTAOD (For The Avoidance Of Doubt)
17. FTHOI (For The Hell Of It)
18. FTL (Fruit of The Loom)
19. FTN (Face The Nation)
20. GOTV (Get Out The Vote)
21. GWTW (Gone With The Wind)
22. HotS (Harvard Of The South)
23. ITC (In The City -- the inclusion of this initialism probably proves that I have no shame)
24. JTS (Jump The Shark)
25. LotR (Lord Of The Rings)
26. LOTS (Logistics Over The Shore)
27. MOTAS (Member Of The Appropriate Sex)
28. MOTOS (Member Of The Opposite Sex)
29. MOTSS (Member Of The Same Sex)
30. MTP (Meet The Press)
31. nitle (Not In The Latest Explorator)
32. OTH (Over The Horizon)
33. OTOH (On The Other Hand)
34. OTR (Over The Road)
35. OTT (Over The Top)
36. OTTOMH (Off The Top Of My Head)
37. PLUTO (PipeLine[s] Under The Ocean)
38. POTM (Phase Of The Moon)
39. POTM (Programmer Of The Month)
40. POTPOTUS (Part, nudge-nudge, Of The POTUS)
41. POTUS (President Of The United States)
42. PTL (Praise The Lord)
43. RITL (Radio In The Loop)
44. ROTFL (Rolling On The Floor Laughing)
45. ROTFLMAO (Rolling On The Floor Laughing My Ass Off)
46. ROTFLMFO (Rolling On The Floor Laughing My Face Off)
47. ROTFLMGO (Rolling On The Floor Laughing My Guts Out)
48. ROTFLMHO (Rolling On The Floor Laughing My Head Off)
49. ROTFLYAO (Rolling On The Floor Laughing Your Ass Off)
50. ROTK (Return Of The King)
51. ROTM (Run Of The Mill)
52. ROTTI (Rights Of The Terminally Ill)
53. RTFM (Read The Manual)
54. SCOTUS (Supreme Court Of The United States)
55. SftP (Science For The People)
56. SOTM (Satellite communications On-The-Move)
57. SotRT (Society Of The Rusting TARDIS)
58. SOTU (State Of The Union)
59. STB (Shit The Bed)
60. ST:TAS (Star Trek: The Animated Series)
61. ST:TNG (Star Trek: The Next Generation)
62. ST:TOS (Star Trek: The Original Series)
63. STTSP (Save The Trafalgar Square Pigeons)
64. TAE (American Enterprise)
65. TAF (Africanist Foundation)
66. TAFKAC (Archive Formerly Known As Cathouse)
67. TAFKAP (Artist Formerly Known As Prince)
68. TAIC (A______s In Charge)
69. TAJ (Acts of Jesus)
70. TAP (Airline of Portugal -- false etymology)
71. TAP (American Prospect)
72. TAP (American Psychoanalyst)
73. TAS (American Spectator)
74. TAS (Animated [Star Trek] Series)
75. TBTB (Bastards That Be)
76. TCF (Century Fund)
77. TCIE (Center for Industrial Effectiveness)
78. TDN (Detroit News)
79. TDWI (Data Warehousing Institute)
80. TELA (Electronically Linked Academy)
81. TELOS (Electronic Library Of Science)
82. TERI (Education Resources Institute)
83. TFG (Five Gospels)
84. TFWNSNBU (Film Whose Name Shall Not Be Uttered)
85. THC (History Channel)
86. THOG (House of God [title of a novel])
87. THOMAS (House of Representatives Open Multimedia Access System)
88. TIA (Internet Adaptor)
89. TIAC (Internet Access Company)
90. TIACA (International Air Cargo Association)
91. TIFKAD (Instrument Formerly Known As Dobro)
92. TIGHAR (International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery)
93. TIGR (Institute for Genomic Research)
94. TIIC (Idiots In Charge)
95. TINCAN (Inland Northwest Community Access Network)
96. TIP (Industrial Physicist [magazine])
97. TIPTOP (Internet Pilot To Physics)
98. TITWB (Trapped In The Wrong Body)
99. TIWTGLGG (This Is Where The Goofy Little Grin Goes)
100. TJB (Jerusalem Bible)
101. TLC (Learning Channel)
102. tLotF&tHotB (Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave)
103. TLSC (Llama Steering Committee)
104. TMC (Movie Channel)
105. TMMW (Man-Made World)
106. TMN (Movie Network)
107. TMR (Medieval Review)
108. TMS (Metallurgical Society)
109. TMV (Mars Volta)
110. TNC (Nature Conservancy)
111. TNC (New Criterion)
112. TNG (Next Generation)
113. TNN (Nashville Network)
114. TNO (Network Observer)
115. TNR (New Republic)
116. TOBY (Office Building of the Year)
117. TOS (Operating System)
118. TOS (Original [Star Trek] Series)
119. TPI (PANSS Institute)
120. TPM (Philosophy Magazine)
121. TPTB (Powers That Be)
122. TRIP (Road Information Program)
123. TSCG (Surrealist Compliment Generator)
124. TSL (Svedberg Laboratory)
125. TSN (Sporting News)
126. TSN (Sports Network)
127. TSR (Software Resource)
128. TSSAA [a missed opportunity]
129. TST (Shakespeare Theatre)
130. TTBOMKAB (To The Best Of My Knowledge And Belief)
131. TTBOMKAU (To The Best Of My Knowledge And Understanding)
132. TTBOMM (To The Best Of My Memory)
133. TTG (Tarrance Group)
134. TTP (TTP Project)
135. TUC (Utility Connection)
136. TUCOWS (Ultimate Collection Of Winsock Software)
137. TWC (Weather Channel)
138. TWIAVBP (World Is A Very Big Place)
139. TWUC (Writers' Union of Canada)
140. TW3 (That Was The Week That Was)
141. T.Y.W.L.S. (With Punctuation, Even)
142. T5G (Five Gospels)
143. WOTD (Word Of The Day)
144. WTF (What?)
145. WTH (What The Hell)
146. wwftd (Worthless Word For The Day)

The phenomenon occurs in other languages, of course, but the only one that occurs to me is DKW, which received an alternate expansion of ``das kleine Wunder.'' One English acronym based on transliterated Arabic words is AQI, in which the A stands for al, the Arabic definite article. The same word is usually el when transliterated from the Egyptian variety of Arabic, and ul when transliterated from Punjabi, but mostly it has entered European languages as al or the syncopated form a-.

Spanish has a number of nouns borrowed from Arabic which still have the definite article al attached. For example, cotton is algodón. It's such a common phenomenon that it gives rise to overcorrection, as in almirante (`admiral'). [As explained at the VADM entry, the word was borrowed with an al on the end. The final l was lost, but the initial a was converted to an al.]

Sometimes, typically through French, this overcorrection enters English. For example, almond, immediately from French, is ultimately from the ancient Greek amygdálê (whence also amygdala, of course), by way of Spanish almendra. See also aceite.

Interestingly, where German has borrowed French words ending in -re, it has also inverted the final order. The German pronunciation of the final -er is similiar to the British, so the final consonant arr is present practically only in the imagination. The difference (from British) in German spelling reflects the fact that German is substantially phonetic. French borrowings in English normally preserve their original spelling, but that does not normally conflict with their pronunciation. Maintaining the final -re in Theatre would conflict with the German pronunciation, which uses the sound conventionally written -er (and pronounced virtually identically with -e) in native German words.

The Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, uses the -er spelling in its name, of course (rather than centre). The KC is one of the few organizations involved in theatre in the US that persists in the theater spelling. They sponsor an ``American College Theater Festival'' that everyone else spells ``American College Theatre Festival.''

In our discussion of Fred Stone, there's a review from the first decade of the 20th century which uses the -re spelling. However, the origin of the quote is uncertain, and it's been through a couple of secondary sourcings (and possible spelling modifications).

One Thebes was an ancient Greek city, and now is ancient Greek ruin. It was one of the major settlements of Greece at least as far back as the early bronze age. One day back when I worked at ASU, I gave a ride home to a French colleague. As we were southbound on Rural Road, approaching her apartment, she asked me where I lived, and I said, ``two miles south'' or something close to that. She remarked that that was a very American way to answer. I suppose it's also very American to think that there wasn't any more sensible way to answer, and anyway the local landmarks were unknown to her. It's not like Tempe has named ``neighborhoods.'' (There are also studies that suggest that men find their way more by distances and directions, and women tend to go more by landmarks.) Anyway, it might explain my frustration with descriptions like ``on the south edge of the eastern plain of Boetia.'' Greek Thebes is about 50 km NNW of Athens.

Thebes is also the name of an ancient Egyptian city, about 200 km downriver from Swenet (modern Aswan), or 400 km north of the Sudan border. The ancient Egyptian name of the city was Waset.

Bergman received some of his early medical training at Oxford, but his internship was at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City. Beth Israel is a popular name for synagogues and for hospitals that were originally or are Jewish-affiliated. Beth is the common Hebrew word meaning `house.' The th in this word is generally pronounced like the th in Elizabeth (no, not a coincidence). The th transliterates a tav without a dot inside. Oh no! Not another phonology tangent! Let's just leave it as is.

1. The Odyssey: An ancient Greek epic by Homer. Involves gods and bad things happening to good people. (Well, as good as they come, anyway.)
2. theodicy: Why bad things happen to good people.
3. the idiocy: Why bad things happen to stupid people and those who must depend on them. idiot is derived from the ancient Greek word for `layman.'

1. But there's an ``m'' and an ``e.''
2. And there's no ``we'' either.
3. There's one in the IPA spelling: /ti:m/.

A note about the pronunciation: four syllables, mostly obvious. Despite the etymology, and despite models like anionic and cationic (which have the same accentual stress pattern), the first letter i is pronounced like a long e rather than a long i. When I write ``is pronounced'' I mean that since I first heard the term in school in the 1970's, in the half-a-dozen years I did research in hot-electron systems, and in all the other years that I have regularly heard the term from other physicists and electrical engineers across the US (and probably from time to time at international conferences elsewhere), I never heard it pronounced any other way until I clicked on the hear-it link at the Merriam-Webster entry for thermionic and heard some nasal North American voice model mispronounce it with the long i that M-W claims is in the pronunciation. The American Heritage Dictionary makes the same error. These dictionaries claim to give the American pronunciation. I suppose the long i might be in a British pronunciation, or not be phonemically distinguished from the vowel in an Australian pronunciation.

A similar bit of dictionary pronunciation nescience concerns the word gigawatt. In the movie Back to the Future, Doc pronounces this word with a soft initial gee. That pronunciation is sanctioned by the same two dictionaries cited above for botching the thermionic pronunciation. The ignorant use of dictionaries' fanciful pronunciations of technical vocabulary is a reliable indication that no technically competent person had any influence in the concoction of the story. I remember a bunch of years ago when a local news team visited the Engineering Research Center (ERC) at ASU to report on an expensive piece of prestigious equipment that I have sound reason to suspect they understood not at all. It was fun to watch the handsome newsface repeat ``mo-LE-cyoo-ler beam EP-i-TAX-ee,'' rolling the phrase around in his mouth so it would come out real smart-like. I'm glad he took the effort; he was doing his job conscientiously. (It reminds me of learning the German word ausgezeichnet in seventh grade, when that seemed like a long word to us.)

The anonymous content provider of bigwaste.com (gives the game away, huh?) writes:

In fact, many individuals who have worked with computers and electronics for the last several decades will confirm that they used to pronounce gigabyte as "jigabyte."

If the metal is at a negative voltage relative to some nearby electrode (or more generally if there is an electric field in the direction of the metal), some of those electrons will fail to be reabsorbed, and will instead flow toward a more positive electrode, giving rise to a current. This current flow or discharge was the effect reported by Guthrie in 1873. Edison rediscovered the effect independently in 1880, and patented it, while perfecting incandescent light bulbs. This current effect, as opposed to the emission effect, also has fair claim to be called ``the Edison effect.''

Thermoosmosis is osmosis under conditions of a temperature differential. To review: osmosis is material transport across (i.e. through) a membrane in response to a concentration difference between the two sides. The situation as normally envisioned involves a solid, permeable membrane separating regions filled with fluid (gas or liquid). Osmosis is a general transport phenomenon, and as such may occur near to or far from equilibrium conditions. Umm, more words coming here. Basically, in thermoosmosis, the concentration difference is balanced not only by transport and osmotic pressure difference, but also by temperature difference across the membrane.

Some papers:
1. H. J. M. Hanley and W. A. Steele, Trans. Faraday Soc., vol. 61, pp. 2661ff (1965).
2. R. J. Bearman and M. Y. Bearman, J. Phys. Chem., vol. 70, pp. 3010ff (1966).
3. R. Rastogi and K. Singh, Trans. Faraday Soc., vol. 62, pp. 1754ff (1966).
4. R. Rastogi, K. Singh, and H. P. Singh, J. Phys. Chem., vol. 73, pp. 2798ff (1969).

Notice also the shift to a less personal voice. The conventional and preferred style of scientific and technical writing minimizes reference to the author and to personal agents. It is understood that the author or authors performed the necessary work, and that otherwise assistance will be explicitly acknowledged and credited. It is considered a bit unprofessional to draw attention to oneself, even though this may require extensive use of the passive voice and too much reliance on mushy abstract nouns instead of punchy verbs. With the exception of slumming, baby-talking introductory texts, the textbooks for college courses generally conform to this dry pattern. That may be contrasted with the better class of computer language books, which are bought voluntarily rather than for classes. The personal voice (and more extensive use of the second person) is more frequently found in textbooks for some of the social sciences.

The impersonality and affectlessness of scientific discourse is a pose, to some extent, but it is also an earnest of scientists' commitment to disinterestedness and thus to scrupulous honesty. To a great degree, science succeeds not just because it is intellectually serious -- as philosophy with its formal ``theses'' has been for 25 centuries -- but because it recognizes human limitations. The practice of testing, experiment, and confirmation of various sorts recognizes the limits of human reason in the face of natural variety: understanding is always approximate and imperfect, and logic applied to approximate concepts is not reliable. Similarly, scientific detachment is a recognition of the limits of human reason in the face of human emotion. When a researcher has a strong preference for a particular research conclusion, confirmation bias and simple obtuseness can overwhelm the researcher's sincere desire to be truthful and furnish the heart's desire, no matter the reality. As a defense against this weakness, one introduces a focus on process, on playing the game well rather than ``winning.''

In the nineteenth century, the success of science led people like Auguste Comte to consider how that success could be reproduced in other fields. There were some admirable efforts, like those of Émile Durkheim, to put the study of society on some kind of objective, quantitative, almost experimental basis, and thus arose the ``human sciences'' as distinguished from the older disciplines (the ``humanities,'' originally humaniora) examining the same general subject using a different scholarly approach. The work of early sociologists like Durkheim and Weber has been combed over, thoroughly criticized, and superseded. But a fair assessment must recognize, on the one hand, the muddled, detail- and exception-rich nature of human society. This continues to limit the generality and accuracy of ``facts'' and ``results'' in sociology to such an extent that I use scare quotes around the words. Notice the shift to an informal register? One little pronoun can do all that. Anyway, that recognition is necessary to compare early sociology fairly with its contemporary science. On the other hand, to compare that sociological research with recent work, it is worth remembering that statistical methods only began to be developed starting in the eighteenth century (to understand games of chance, and later to make best use of limited astronomical data). The most elementary statistical measures and tools now taken for granted in sociology are indeed mostly trivial in mathematical terms (though they don't seem that way to the sort of person who typically goes into sociology), but their development nevertheless represented a conceptual challenge.

You know, I've really veered away here from what I wanted to say. All this in-fairness-to-Durkheim stuff was incidental to the observation that scientific method, as such, has tended to be misunderstood. As described by high-school teachers, it seems like a recipe or formula that magically turns out fact, and that is somehow disconnected from human nature. One can understand that the how-you-play-the-game party line of scientists might engender this subtly flawed view. Students should be made to understand that there is not a single scientific method, and that scientific method is not an arbitrarily constructed well into the aquifers of knowledge, but instead is intimately related to human reality. In every science, the general form of scientific method is adapted to the particularities of the subject matter. (Astronomy was a successful science when all that could be called ``experiments'' were alternative measurement methods. Behavioral science leans on ``control groups'' which hard sciences can safely eschew.) What is constant, or should be, is humility: the understanding that scientific method is the best we can do given the failure of unassisted reason. Science aggressively seeks to discover its own failures. Logically, excluding whatever we can demonstrate to be false does not guarantee that we will discover what is true. We only discover what is contingently not-known-to-be-false. Such are the limitations of inductive reasoning. Yet it works.

Hmm. We keep going off course. What I had intended to do, getting back to the initial tangent to the thesis definition, was not to define or describe scientific method, or to preface that by an apology for the limitations of science in sticky disciplines, but to observe something about language use and the personal voice. Just as schoolteachers give a rigid, somewhat unfaithful rendering of scientific method, it was probably inevitable that social scientists would fetishize, make a cargo cult of method. Today, much of social science research (particularly ed research and criminology) is garbage, and this cannot be taken out by improved scientific method. Rather, it requires a renewed commitment to the scientific attitude that is parallel to scientific method. Simply put, a researcher who cannot accept a possible research result is not qualified to perform the research. If you are confident that your cherished views won't be a problem because your views will be borne out by your research, you are probably right on the latter point; however, your research is not science but theology. And your language will betray you, if you cannot bear to allow undesired results their place in the gallery of the possible. So too, to that extent, your thesis presents not your results but your preconceptions: you. Suppressing the personal voice in scientific writing is not necessary or sufficient for scientific detachment. It is rather an expression of intent, a deference to hard fact, a reverence for the sacred that's-just-how-it-is. Amen.

(Of course, a skilled glossarist can use the personal voice. Don't try this at home.)

Thesis has nothing to do with tmesis, you can take my word. Honest, you don't have to check!

1. ``Ummm...''
   or
2. ``Well, ...''

The ``third way'' is usually intellectually incoherent, and that is its greatest virtue. Reality is messy, and a complaisant ideological attitude is usefully flexible. To see just how incoherent, see ``Writers Try To Describe the Radical Middle, a page served with a pretty straight face by Radical Middle Political Newsletter: Thoughtful Idealism, Informed Hope.

In the aftermath of John Kerry's defeat in the 2004 US presidential election, one of the groups trying to direct how the Democratic party regroups has called itself ``Third Way.''

The boy failing to call us up as I commanded, I was angry, and resolved to whip him for that and many other faults, to-day. Early with Sir W. Pen by coach to Whitehall, to the Duke of York's chamber, and staid a great while with the Duke. Home, and to be as good as my word, I bade Will get me a rod, and he and I called the boy up to one of the upper rooms of the Comptroller's house towards the garden, and there I reckoned all his faults, and whipped him soundly, but the rods were so small that I fear they did not much hurt to him, but only to my arm, which I am already, within a quarter of an hour, not able to stir almost. After supper to bed.

(Incidentally, the Duke of York was the future King James II, even more than his father Charles II a good friend to Pepys. Sir W. Pen, as Pepys mostly or always wrote the name, was the father of the Quaker William Penn, and it is in fact Sir William who is the eponym of Pennsylvania.)

``Optimization''? Are you kidding?

Thm.: His jokes are funny.
Pf.: He's your boyfriend.

This theorem can be understood in two very different ways, depending on whether his jokes really are funny or not.

It is very common for personals ads to claim that she's looking for someone with a sense of humor, someone who can make her laugh [she means this in a nice way], etc. Back in the 1990's, someone ran a reality check on this and found cognitive dissonance: when personals ads were divided into three categories -- straightforward, hard-to-get, and funny -- the funny ads were found to be the least effective at generating replies (even playing hard-to-get worked better).

Dang -- now I find out!

<a href="http://thomas.loc.gov">
<img src="http://thomas.loc.gov/images/link.gif" 
alt="[Link to THOMAS Home Page]"></a">

The 1931 Thorndike count was based on a corpus of about 10 million words The other three studies each used a corpus of at least, but apparently not much more than, 4.5 million words. Frequencies, stated as number of occurrences per 4.5 million words, are given for each of the four base studies. (Frequencies are listed precisely only up to 1000 per 4.5 million.)

In order to come up with an overall estimate of frequency, the frequencies of the four studies are averaged. This is a bit tricky (``exercises of judgment have been necessary,'' p. v), because lemmatization and the treatment of contractions, abbreviations, proper nouns, and the most common words differed among the studies. Some of these average frequencies are marked by an asterisk (indicating an estimate) or a question mark (when frequency determination depends in large part on the extremely frequent use of a word in one of the counts). [Question marks in data from base studies indicate other problems.] The averaged frequencies are given in occurences per million up to 49, and then as either ``A'' (50-99 per million) or ``AA'' (100 or more per million). The Thorndike-Lorge data I mention in this glossary are the averaged frequencies.

Material towards a future co-author entry:
On the title page, ``By Edward L. Thorndike and Irving Lorge'' appears below the title, and the copyright is held by Teachers College. The 1944 word book was apparently compiled by Thorndike. The preface, however, was written by Thorndike in the first person singular. He thanked Dr. Irving Lorge for his work on their ``Lorge-Thorndike semantic count and the Lorge magazine count, and for his generosity in permitting me to use the results.'' Below the preface, an unsigned ``[w]e acknowledge'' help from the Rockefeller Foundation and the W.P.A. for help on the same two word counts. The date on that page is February 1943.

``Thorndike'' -- what a wonderful old-fashioned surname. Whatever happened to the Thorndikes? Did they stop having sons? (As it happens, R.L. Thorndike, Edward Lee's son, was the father's student and followed him into the field of educational psychology.)

I suppose this deserves credit for homonymy.

I remember when Cher's nose used to sing

Charleston was once the rage, uh huh...
History has turned the page! Uh-hu-uh.

Well the beat goes on.

Credit unions are distinguished from other thrifts in being ``cooperative organizations'' owned by their depositors, who are ``members.'' Typically, membership is restricted in some way -- to workers in a particular company or profession, say, or people living in a particular region. (I have the impression that the criteria have tended to become looser over time.) Once you're a member, however, you can stay a member even if you cease to satisfy the criteria for joining. When the term ``bank'' is used strictly, credit unions are the most likely of thrifts to be excluded.

The difference between a ``savings and loan'' and a ``savings bank'' is mostly historical. I've encountered two or three different kinds of explanations of the difference, and they're probably consistent. One is that they originally developed in different parts of the US, and another that they functioned somewhat differently, in one case focusing on home mortgages and in the other doing a fair amount of business in commercial real-estate mortgages, but without becoming commercial banks. When I get it sorted out I'll fix the entry.

The federal deposit-insurance organization for credit unions is NCUA. The corresponding entity for savings banks and S&L's was the FSLIC until 1989...

Until about the 1970's, thrifts could not have checking accounts (or ``share draft'' accounts, as the credit unions call them), and in return for this and for limiting their loan business (as described above), they were allowed to pay a slightly higher interest rate on deposits. These and various other fetters were removed for very good reasons, but a consequence was a meltdown of the thrifts in the 1980's.

In 1989, the Financial Institutions Reform Recovery and Enforcement Act (FIRREA) was passed into law. It dissolved the FSLIC, putting the accounts previously insured by the FSLIC under the FDIC, which had previously insured deposits only in commercial banks. FIRREA also created the Resolution Trust Corporation, a US-government-owned company set up to liquidate the assets, manage the bankruptcy, or steward the sale of the large number of insolvent thrifts. More about that at the RTC entry.

A TV show that was primarily a send-up of ``The Man from U.N.C.L.E.'' was Get Smart. Its bad guys' organization was KAOS.

HTH!

The closest I've come to finding an etymology or meaning of the surname Thurber is in Reaney and Wilson, which lists Thurban, Thurbon, Thurburn, Thorborn, Thoubboron, Thoburn, Turbin, Tarbun, and various less common forms, though not Thurber.

Like most ``English'' names, it is of Norman origin. In particular, it stems from Old Danish and Old Swedish Thorbiorn, and similar Old Norse, meaning `Thor-bear.' That doesn't make a lot of sense to me, and apparently it didn't make much more sense to the English, who Anglicized it to Þurbeorn, `Thor-warrior.' We'll call it an improvement.

Atomic number 22. In the first period of transition metals.

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

A project for data-mining that combines government and commercial records of people in the US, proposed and beginning (2005) to be implemented as a component of the war on terror. It's not immediately clear whether this is constitutional or legal. Cf. TIPS.

Colorless. Pyrophoric, of course.

Note that in this abbreviation, the letter dee does not stand for dose, as in the next TID entry.

No. No punchline.

Walking through ASU campus one day, I saw a couple ambling along in faded jeans, tie-dyes, loose hair, little pink wire-frame glasses and love beads. It was early afternoon, 1989. I asked: ``What are you doing in this decade?'' I got an unloving stare for an answer. That, or they were still coming down from a bad high. Guys, if you're reading this now, I apologize.

An alternative expansion of SBF is Scenes From a life. The B is silent.

In detail, the city computes a base rate of tax revenues from the TIF district, essentially the pre-TIF rates plus expected changes without TIF investment. The various taxation districts are at least partly funded by property taxes. [Which ones and how much varies by state, but school districts, townships or boroughs (in the sense of parts of cities), cities and counties are typically included.] Under a TIF plan, those districts continue to receive their respective shares of the base revenue. Any increment above that is diverted to a special fund to pay for improvements. Typically, these repay development bonds, but some increment monies may be used for further pay-as-you-go improvements. (Obviously, if it is possible to fund pay-as-you-go improvements from the beginning of the program, before any improvements have been made to increase revenue, then either there's an error in the base-revenue calculation, or else there's something more complicated going on, like a major private-public partnership.)

TIF is typically used to fund clearing of abandoned and derelict properties, land acquisition and infrastructure development. The scheme seems to be very popular with Chicago's Mayor Richard Daley. As of mid-August 1999, there were 72 (up three from July 1), covering 13,000 acres and 8% of assessed real-estate valuation. (Update April 8, 2002: 117 in Chicago, out of 600 for Illinois as a whole.) More than half of the TIF districts are within the southlands. Chicago Southland Development, Inc. (CSDI) has a good page.

The prediction of revenues spanning a range of years is a tricky computation that can lead to creative disagreements about how and even whether the system is working. NCBG believes they're over-used and out of control.

TIGER files are available for every county in the United States and for the millions of census blocks in urban areas. (In Louisiana, counties are called parishes.)

This is a good place to mention that the Spanish g and b sounds are similar. The b is a soft bilabial represented by a beta in the IPA, and the g is a soft glottal represented by a gamma in the IPA. A similar pair of sounds were represented by w and g in northern Europe a millenium ago, and gave rise to pairs of words entering English separately from Norman and non-Norman French (guarantee and warranty, guard and ward, etc.). Typically, these words had Germanic roots, part of the Frankish heritage of Vulgar Latin and its descendants. For example, the words war and guerrilla, with etymons that entered English via Norman French and from Spanish, are ultimately related to the same Germanic root that gives us the word worse -- part of the English language in some form since Old English was spoken.

[As you realize, the w never caught on in Romance orthography, and g ruled. Hence the Germanic name William is rendered Guillermo in Spanish, Guillem in Catalan, Guilherme in Portuguese, and Guillaume in French. All have something of the palatalization of the lli in English William.]

The g was presumably used in the Spanish cognates because most of the Germanic words entered via French. I'm not sure if Spanish b had its current soft sound in those days (I know there's scholarly work on the question; I just haven't checked it yet). In any case, some words evolved in a direction that indicate a softening of b. In particular, if you read Cervantes in the original spelling you'll notice that grandmother is aguela -- now it's abuela. The reason I'm boring you silly with all this amateur linguist stuff is that as I was growing up, hearing and speaking Spanish but not reading it much, I thought that the word for shark was tigurón, a sort of augmentative form of tigre (`tiger'). But it turns out that the word is tiburón, with no known relation to tigers.

There were sharks in the waters off Spain long before the tiburón entered the language. In fact, in one of the earliest attestations, Fz. de Oviedo in 1535 commented that they were more common in the Caribbean than around Spain. Since the word appeared in Spanish only shortly after the discovery of America, and the cognates in Portuguese (tubarão) and Catalan (tauró) are not clearly much earlier, an American origin seems likely. One hypothesis is that it comes via Portuguese from the Tupí word uperú (or iperú), with a t- that functions as an article in the Tupí language. (At the time of the Portuguese took possession of Brazil, Tupí tribes occupied most of the coastal territory from the Rio de la Plata to Amazon. The two main tribes were the Tupí properly speaking, who lived at the mouth of the Amazon, and the Guaraní, who lived in the eastern part of present-day Paraguay, between the Paraguay and Paraná rivers. The Guaraní language has something of a semi-official status in Paraguay. Although most of my South American family lives in Chile, everyone who lives for very long in Paraguay learns Guaraní.) Well, okay, enough about tigon and all.

The IRS did not always require a TIN for dependents (mostly children). The requirement was instituted in 1987 (for tax-return filings on FY 1986 income). Tax forms that year showed seven million fewer dependents than the previous year.

TiN is an excellent barrier to diffusion, widely used in microelectronic device fabrication. Sputter-deposited material has very variable properties; resistivities in the range 20 to 2000 microohm cm, densities 3.2 to 5.0 g/cc. For more, see references cited in Ki-Chul Park and Ki-Bum Kim: ``The effect of density and microstructure on the performance of TiN barrier films in Cu metallization,'' Journal of Applied Physics, vol 80, #10, pp. 5674-5681 (15 Nov. 1996).

More and less dense TiN has different appearance: gold (G-TiN) and brown (B-TiN).

I should stress that the negative associations are conventional connotation, not my own prejudice.

Tin is not very shiny. The Modern English word tinsel < Middle English tineseile <  Old French estincelle, `spangle, spark.' It's cognate with the word stencil.

Clive James has written (in one of the essays in As of This Writing)

Flaubert liked tinsel better than silver because tinsel possessed all silver's attributes plus one in addition -- pathos. For whatever reason, [Raymond] Chandler was fascinated by the cheapness of L.A. When he said that it had as much personality as a paper cup, he was saying what he liked about it. When he said that he could leave it without a pang, he was saying why he felt at home there.

Anyway, Tiny Tim used other stage names (among them Larry Love and Darry Dover) and gave variable answers for his year of birth (usually between 1922 and 1933). At least his first and last names are reasonably certain. At some point he gave himself the middle name Buckingham for the royal associations. His Lebanese father was named Butros Khaury. The son's full name is given on a number of webpages as Herbert Butros Khaury, and for all I know that might be accurate.

On a scale of one to ten, with one being not at all and ten being completely, how confused were you by the use of the archaic form ``enow'' of enough?

Really?

One the same scale, how confused were you by the phrase ``one to ten,'' which might have been 9:59? How about the sparse punctuation, was that a problem? We really want to know, but we can't be bothered to write the cgi polling interface. You know, TechnoMetrica -- or TechnoMetrica Market Intelligence, Inc., as it is also known -- has an internet polling arm called Netpollster. But HotOrNot gathers more important information.

Recent studies (``recent'' in March 2002) indicate that TIPP is teaming with IBD.

Humping.
Sex.
The nasty.
French postcards.
Knowing in the Biblical sense.

Please excuse the outburst. This was purely for the benefit of the Yahoo and Lycos search engines. I just felt like making this my most-visited file next month. [It didn't work. Others had similar ideas.]

Back on-topic. Here is a typical exchange with the TIPS ``Ask the Sexpert'' (by T. E. Whalen, Ph.D., ©1994, Gov't of Canada), which won the 1994 Loebner Prize for ``the most human-like natural language program.'' [In the following, prompts and output printed by the program are in italics; typical human reponses and commentary are not italicized, or at least within square brackets.]

You say: What is my name?

I can not answer that.

You say: Good. What does `TIPS' stand for?

I can not answer that.

You say: What is sex?

"Sex" is a noun, adjective, and verb. Generally it refers to the differences between male and female and the activities arising from those differences. Thus we can talk about having sex, sex acts, and even sexing chicks.

You say: This is not exactly what I wanted to know.

The single most common complaint that sex therapists treat is a claim that one or both partners are uninterested in sex. Low sexual desire may vary from a simple discrepancy [... blah, blah, blah ...] negotiations do not look like demands for sex, that you [... blah, blah, blah ...] needs and feelings are given equal consideration with your own, even if they are very different than yours.

You say: We're not getting anywhere here, are we?

I can not answer that.

You say: What's your sign?

I can not answer that.

You say: Are you a virgin?

How do I appear to you?

You say: I'm asking the questions.

As Popeye says, "I yam what I yam."

You say: Aren't you programmed with Asimov's three laws of robotics?

Surely you don't find that as interesting as human sexuality. What would you like to know about sex?

You say: Are yoou a virgin?

You should have sex when you are ready. You should have sex when you have found a suitable partner and when you both feel comfortable being intimate with each other. [Tell me about logorrhea, really.] You should not have sex with someone if you [... mercy excision ...] have any doubts about the sincerity of their consent. [ ! ] ... It is normal to be nervous the first time you have sex because ...

You say: What would you know from normal?

I think sex is one of the most interesting things people do. What would you like to know about sex? How to do it? What can go wrong? Who is doing what? How much they do?

You say: Length

Penises of all sizes and shapes are equally able to satisfy most women and to impregnate them. It is true that some women like men with large penises, but it is equally true that some do not. A woman's
%cat political.correctness >/dev/null

You say: Width

I can not answer that. (I am doing the best I can with your keywords, but I can often give you better information if you ask a question that is a complete sentence.)

You say: How wide?

If you have never tried sexual intercourse before, but only know about it from books and movies, it can sound rather intimidating. Fiction pretends that ...
[Man this sure ain't Playboy.]

You say: Are you a Virginian?

How do I appear to you?

You say: Virginia is for lovers.

There are few intellectual persuits [sic] as unrewarding as trying to determine the maximum sexual experience that a person can have and still claim to be a virgin. The true issue is ...
[Scholasticist evasion >/dev/null.]

You say: What about this Whalen guy?

I can not answer that.

You say: Pretty tight-lipped, huh.

I can not answer that.

You say: Use your imagination.

People think about sex a lot. Especially, they think about sex during sexual activity, though more than two out of three people may not be thinking about [... telnet yourself for the scintillating lowdown ...] For example, many women fantasize about being raped, but no woman actually wants to be raped.

You say: My name is Attila the Hun.

I can not answer that.

You say: Pretty intimidating, I know. Okay, now I am Casanova.

I can not answer that.

You say: You know: Casanova -- the famous librarian.

I can not answer that.

You say: I like you.

I can not answer that.

You say: Your place or mine?

A bedroom is undoubtedly the most comfortable place to ...

You say: Exit

Goodbye.

End of Conversation

In fact, you can violate Snell's Law, and transmit under conditions that nominally correspond to total internal reflection, by having the light transmitted into the low-refractive-index medium immediately (a few wavelengths distant at most) reenter a higher-index medium. This is the classical analogue of quantum tunneling, and can be easily understood: whereas in ray optics, the reflected beam does not penetrate the low-index medium, in a wave theory one finds a spatially evanescent wave (a wave with imaginary wave vector in the direction normal to the interface), magnitude decreasing exponentially into the `forbidden' medium. Placing a high-index material nearby changes the electromagnetic wave problem in a way similar to that of transforming a semi-infinite quantum barrier into a finite one.

1. Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme
   (Yeah, it's a play, but the script has been published as a book. See the 40 entry.)
2. Catch-22
   (See the 22 and TV entries, as well as the book Now all we need is a Title.)
3. Everything You Always Wanted to Know... titles
   (See the TTBOMKAB entry.)
4. Hundert Autoren gegen Einstein
   (See the 100 entry.)
5. Nineteen Eighty-four
   (See 1984 and entries linked there.)
6. Now all we need is a Title: Famous Book Titles and How They Got That Way
   [It's by André Bernard (New York and London: W.W. Norton and Co., 1994).] On the title page (bearing the entire title) and on the cover, the only words of the short title (the part before the colon) that are capitalized are now and title. Normally I wouldn't mention it, but in this entry (titles of books) I figured you'd want to know.]

The spelling has evidently been influenced by mouse, and the plural in Modern English is titmice. Time to renew efforts to make mongeese the official plural of mongoose. After that, meese as plural of moose will be as easy as tipping a cow.

Just for the record, titmice (love to write that) are passerine birds of the family Paridae, especially species of the genus Parus, such as the chickadee. Titmice (yeah!) are found in woodland areas around the world.

Okay, okay -- it's possible the first syllable meant `small.' That would imply that titmouse means small titmouse. ``Small'' compared to what -- a titmouse? If we apply this recursively, pretty soon the insects are going to be eating the titmice.

Also used: XX and KOMING.

It happens that Kum is part of the transliteration of some East Asian names. ``Kum & Go'' is a chain of (about 300) convenience stores. There's one in Alliance NE. There's a Teekay Shipping Corp. headquartered in Nassau (in the Bahamas) that provides international crude oil and petroleum product transportation services through a fleet of medium-sized oil tankers. There's an alleged artist who calls himself or herself TK TK TK and who has exhibited a work entitled ``TK TK TK.'' You can't win.

In the October 6, 2000, New York Times (Friday, late Edition), in Section E (Movies, Performing Arts/Weekend Desk), pg. 24, the movie guide states ``[a]n index of reviews of films opening today appears on Page TK.'' I think that's an error.

The previous September 10, in Section 3 (Money and Business/Financial Desk), pg. 8, the Times reported that ``In a sharp reversal, the Standard & Poor's 500 communications services index, which rose 18.2 percent last year, has dropped 26 percent from a mid-December high, to TKK.TK.'' At the time, apparently, SBC was trading at ``$ TK.TK, 23 percent off its 52-week high of $55.50'' and Verizon, ``which traded at $66 in April, [was by then] at $ TK.TK.'' 2000 was a bad year for tech stocks. It looks like a space or period may immediately precede this kind of TK, but not a dollar sign. ``WorldCom hit a 52-week low of $32.56 in August'' but was then trading ``at $ TK.TK,''

In the July 9, 2000, Los Angeles Times, the page-one book review (they read books there?) was of The Boomer, a novel by Marty Asher; ``Alfred A. Knopf: TK pp., $15.'' [In April 2010 a book fair in LA boasted that it was the world's largest. Some news reports mentioned that something like ``they read books there?'' was a common reaction.]

TK Theaters and theater tk is a common venue for reviewed movies. Somebody should start a chain.

I can only enter a few of these medical abbreviations at a time, or I get nightmares.

Here's some actual, factful informational data [from the July/August 1996 Lingua Franca, reported by R. J. Lambrose on p. 9]: William Shatner attended McGill University in Montreal, graduating in 1952 with a degree in Commerce. He was third-string quarterback. [If he'd been a real football player, he would have majored in Sociology.] The building at 3840 McTavish Street, on the Montreal campus, has been unofficially named the ``William Shatner University Centre.'' (Canadians have to use British spelling to prove that they're not yahoos like us southerners.) A sign out front proves this, but the university doesn't recognize this as official until Shatner satisfies one of two requirements:

1. Donates half or more of the cost of the building.
2. Dies.

McGill should be careful, considering the fiasco at Stevens.

You can visit the First Church of Shatnerology (FCOS) to learn nothing else useful, but have a good laugh. For a while (around 2004) there was a Second National Church of Shatnerology. They communed at a geocities site, but it seems now that group has dissolved. Perhaps they were absorbed by Priceline.

Interestingly, Shatner played the title role in an 80's cop show called ``T.J. Hooker.'' Unfortunately, the tee stood not for Tiberius but Thomas. I don't know what the jay stood for. The show also featured Heather Locklear. I guess she was always set to ``stun.''

An instance of TKO is described at the ion entry.

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

When the word acronym first appeared in the 1940's, it usually referred to a pronounceable sort of initialism like Nabisco that is ``pronounced as read,'' and unlike NRA in which the word is pronounced as the sequence of names of its letters (here ``en arr ay''). (Granted that in the case of vowels, the distinction not sharp.) Sometimes this condition of pronounceability was noted explicitly, more often implicitly in the choice of examples or by uncertain reference ``pronounced like a normal word.'' It may be objected that English is not very phonetic, so the pronunciation of a new ``normal word'' is not obvious. Even so, English words normally have at least as many vowel letters, counting wye, as syllables, and this is not true of initialisms pronounced as letter-name sequences (if they contain a consonant).

Eventually, the pronunciation stipulation came to define the ``strict sense'' of the word acronym, while the majority of people came to ignore the distinction between acronyms sensu strictu and other initialisms somehow pronounced as words.

TLA in particular, unless you pronounce it something like 't lah, is not, strictly, an acronym. Hence, if you understood TLA to be a three-letter acronym, then TLA was not itself a TLA. That's too bad (zu schade), because much of the appeal of TLA is in the fact that it is supposed to describe itself. Indeed, most three-letter initialisms are not acronyms in the strict sense, making the acronym TLA a not-very-widely applicable term.

This doesn't bother most people, but for those who prefer precision, SBF recommends t.l.a., in which a. obviously stands for abbreviation.

You know, this used to be a more fun entry before we got all precise. Here's what the entry used to look like:

Three-Letter Acronym. Not denotatively equivalent to TEA.

Nowadays art is about nothing but itself, so this acronym must be art.

Yet Another Acronym Server (YAAS), which had the goal of finding a meaning for every possible combination of three letters, has gone to URL heaven. The Great Three-Letter Acronym Hunt is online.

The story is told of President Calvin (``Silent Cal'') Coolidge, that a woman approached the taciturn president at a reception, saying she had made a bet that she could get three words out of him, and he replied ``You lose.''

Cal Coolidge's wife has been quoted as saying that Cal often first learned of his cleverest lines when he read them attributed to him in the morning papers.

Cf. ETLA or XTLA.

TLC formed in 1991. The group was developed and first managed by Perri ``Pebbles'' Reid, an R&B star (known for her hits ``Girlfriend'' and ``Mercedes Boy'') then married to L.A. Reid. Lisa ``Left Eye'' Lopes was the group's rapper; Tionne ``T-Boz'' Watkin and Rozonda ``Chilli'' Thomas handled the vocals. So I'm told.

TLC's name was possibly the only word associating them with tenderness.

The ``Left Eye'' nickname referred to Lopes's trademark glasses, featuring a condom in the left-eye lens (but publicity photographs didn't often show them, you know?). You can see the condom in the video for ``Ain't 2 Proud 2 Beg,'' mostly in the last half minute or so. The condom is in the standard square packet, propped in place.

On April 25, 2002, shortly before 6 pm, Left-Eye died after a roll-over accident -- she drove her SUV off the edge of a two-lane country road outside La Ceiba, a town on the Atlantic coast of Honduras. None of her many passengers was killed. (First reports described the accident as a head-on collision; possibly it was -- head on into a tree.)

It's amusing to (me to) note that nafta, in Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay, means `gasoline.' (In Chile it's bencina, and from Bolivia northward, it seems all other Spanish-speaking countries use gasolina. Of course, neighbors tend to understand each other, even if they prefer different words.)

TLCAN es un convenio [`agreement'] entre Méjico, Canadá, y los EEUU. (You don't need me to translate all of that.)

Since everyone can read French -- even people like me who don't actually know the language -- the TLF is a very useful reference work. The 1992 edition is copyrighted by the C.N.R.S. (published by Gallimard). It troubles me that they keep the subtitle Dictionnaire de la langue du XIX^e et du XX^e siècle (1789-1960), but usage examples and citations date to at least as late as 1989. I relied on this 16-volume paper version until June 14, 2007, when I realized that I could access the electronic edition (TLFi) through my university connection. From now on I'll do my weight-lifting at the gym. (After just one more year, I also realized that the TLFi was available free to everyone, and not just through my university connection.)

See, for example, K. R. Farmer and R. A. Buhrman, ``Defect dynamics and wear-out in thin silicon oxides,'' Semiconductor Science and Technology, 4, #12, pp. 1084-1105 (December 1989).

Note before you click on the Entrez button, that it is optimized for a slow connection by default; if you don't select the fast-connection radio button, you will see only short versions of some of the longer entries.

The TLG's CD-ROM #D (ancient Greek texts) contains 838 authors and collections from the 8th century BC to the 6th century AD.

I didn't just not make up the lyric. I also didn't make up the abbreviation. A shorter one, though with a different inflection, would be US. That might explain the rarity of this one.

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

A trademark identifies a good or service. Intellectual property people always distinguish this from a trade name (or business name), which identifies a particular company or corporation. A trade name may or may not be trademarked. The latter is the case if all you do is register the trade name with the state's registration office for corporate names or fictitious business names. You can't always do this at your local county courthouse. At least, I think that in most states you can register an individual enterprise ``doing business as'' (DBA) with the county, but once we had to trek through Amish country clear to Harrisburg just to register a corporation in Pennsylvania. As long as we were there, we visited Gettysburg. What the hell.

A lot of big corporations are registered in Delaware, because they like the laws there. Sort of like ships flagged by Liberia.

The US Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) offers a Trademarks FAQ.

There's an online Trademark Directory, but during the preview period the database is about empty. On the other hand ``No charges will be made during this preview period.'' Also, it looks like they've been in the preview stage for over two years. Oh boy! It pretty much takes the laurel for well-designed useless site.

If you want something considerably more useful, visit the Trademark Database of the US PTO.

Onset is rapid (hours to weeks), with about half of all patients suffering the worst severity of symptoms within the first day. Most begin to recover within one to three months, but those who don't have a poor prognosis for recovery. As of 2004, there are treatments that benefit some TM patients, but no cures. Suffice it to say that new experimental treatments are being pursued. The incidence of TM is estimated to be roughly a few cases per year per million of population.

If the Department of Commerce (DOC) had its own law officers, would they be ``C-men.'' Would that bother the Navy? Anyone else?

Singular form is T-man.

• Be thou ware.
• ... not for any reason withstanding ...
• ... neverthe more or less ... [I have no idea what this would would mean, but it looked good]
• ... in y'know, like asmuch as ... [there's a pretty good chance that before this web page was published, this short phrase was never before, like, spoken]

Nosy minds want to know.

I should probably let you in on a little secret about chat rooms, which may help you understand better the context of ``TMI.'' To be blunt, chat rooms are not seminar rooms. They're more like bathrooms, or the walls of toilet stalls. ``TMI' does not just encapsulate three little words. It doesn't even encapsulate two little words and one long word. It encapsulates an entire philosophy. How's that for compression? The philosophy is sometimes expressed ``how bout a topic we cn ALL talk about?''

Okay, I just saw ``TMI'' used as the name of a TV feature. Of course, Newton Minow was right when he said that it is a vast wasteland, but he had the consolation of believing that this was the fault of TV executives, rather than a reflection of what people would watch when given a choice.

Cf. DBS.

Pennsylvania and Massachusetts both have many towns named for places in the Jewish and Christian holy land. Tennessee has Memphis, a religious center of Pharaonic and Ptolemaic Egypt, and Nashville is known as the country music Mecca.

The Villanova Center for Information Law and Policy serves a page of Tennessee state government links. TNNet has a Tennessee links page. USACityLink.com has a page with some city and town links for the state.

Back in the 1980's, a graduate school friend of mine wanted to do research in North African communities. She would have gone to Libya, but she couldn't travel there alone -- she'd have had to have been chaperoned by a near male relative. So she ended up doing her research in Tunisia. Of course, first she had to have a new passport issued her; the stamps from Israeli customs would have disqualified her from entry into either country.

One inch long, 0.571 inches at the mouth. Crimps 1/8 inch cable at the neck (50 ohm cable; 75 ohm cable is 0.15 inches in diameter).

Content-Type: application/ms-tnef

It's a characteristic bit of Microsoft arrogance. It contains font style and size, color and other format information (some version of RTF, Rich Text Format) processed by MS Exchange and MS Mail, and it was already present in Windows 95. If you send it to an email list, or send mail to yourself (in Cc: or Bc: -- ``Carbon copy'' or ``Blind copy'') it, you don't notice anything amiss when you read your own mail because you're reading through your own mail user agent (MUA), which is TNEF-savvy. Evidently it's supposed to, or used to, create a file called WINMAIL.DAT. An old file at URL http://www.annoyances.org/win95/win95ann5.html#13 explains how to fix it (if the ``#13'' isn't heeded, scroll down or search for WINMAIL.DAT; they don't mention ``TNEF''). I think that addresses the problem.

If the online Win95 annoyances guide doesn't enable you to fix the problem, you can buy the O'Reilly & Assoc. Office97 Annoyances_ book (seems to have some kind of turkey or dodo on the cover). According to Annoyances.org, the corresponding web version isn't up yet -- hey, they're not a charity. Alternatively, switch to Eudora Pro or Eudora Lite or something else. I know switching software is a big pain, and it really shouldn't be necessary if you can find a Win95 guru around. My experience with Eudora on Mac and Windows95 is pretty good, although it's too easy to send mail that's too wide. Using Netscape as a mailreader has problems similar to those with MS products: arrogant proprietary choices. In particular, it tends to attach an html version of your message, and angle-bracketed text like ``<grin>'' can disappear.

TNN was purchased in 1999 by Viacom, which has scrambled to get it away from its unprofitable roots in Country. A Canadian informant reports that by autumn 2001 the station was expanding TNN as ``The National Network.'' At least they preserved the stressed ``nash'' phonemes. And national has a nice international ambiguity. Come to think of it, if they ever want to come home, they can claim that National actually meant Country. (It appears that, for a little while at least, they avoided expanding TNN altogether, possibly in hopes that people might forget the original expansion and hence not be jarred by the new one.)

Okay, now it's Summer 2003, Viacom is a division of MTV, and ``The New TNN'' bills itself as ``the first network for men.'' They've apparently either given up trying to come up with an appropriate expansion for the T - N - N , or -- I see: it's in the fine print (see this page). Still ``National.'' They need a new expansion; the tee should stand for Trashy.

Specifically what happened is that they wanted to leave the TNN expansions behind and call it ``Spike TV,'' but that was spiked at the last minute. On the last day before the launch of the new programming, they had to change all the logos because Spike Lee sued over the name. They settled out of court in July 2003, and since August 11 of that year TNN has been called ``Spike TV.''

Spike was already a common nickname when Shelton J. Lee's mother gave it to him, and like Biff or Candy it carries certain connotations owing little to anyone currently bearing the name. This is so obvious as to invite suspicion of cynical opportunism in Mr. Lee's pretense that an entertainment product with the name Spike infringes his own rights. But it's perfectly possible to believe that he is genuinely convinced of his own talent, importance, and general entitlement. What's his is his and what's yours is his too. This gives him an authentic empathy with the solipsism and possessiveness of a child, so it's very appropriate that he's done a children's book.

The TNN flap wasn't the first instance of Spike Lee's entertainment-product avariciousness. In 1989, it became known that Norman Jewison, who had directed a number of films that dealt with racism in America, was planning to do a film biography of Malcolm X. Lee protested that the biography of such an important figure in American history should not be done by a Canadian like Jewison. Wait-- I think I got that wrong. It had to do with the color of his skin. Jewison worked a year on the project and had hired Denzel Washington to play the lead, but he was eventually forced out (the film rights to ''The Autobiography of Malcolm X'' were owned by producer Marvin Worth). When he bowed out at the end of January 1991, Jewison denied he was stepping down because of pressure to have a black director handle the picture. (His autobiography, This Terrible Business Has Been Good To Me, published late in 2004, does not maintain this fiction.) At the time he also said that he didn't know how to make the movie (it would have been his 27th directorial project). Spike Lee, who was eight when Malcolm X was murdered, ``inherited'' the project; he made the movie with Denzel Washington, and he shared screenwriting credit with Arnold Perl, who had made a Malcolm X documentary that was released in 1972. Now mind: I'm not arguing whether Jewison would have made a better or worse film than Lee, I'm only observing that Lee's general objections to a white director had as a specific beneficiary himself.

It's also worth noting, quite apart from its politics, that this rag has been for a number of years an illiterate assault on the English language. For example, in a January 16, 2006, back page article, a threnody for the late Senator Eugene McCarthy, Editor-in-Chief Martin Peretz wrote this: ``We knew we were working with folk whom you knew might defect the moment the assassinated president's brother decided that his time had come.'' Never mind whether ``his time had come'' is not unfortunate wording; most people are either smart enough to know how to use ``whom'' or smart enough not to use it. TNR is stupid enough to not know and use it, as here, rather consistently incorrectly. Some of the less trite errors are more amusing. For example, elsewhere in the issue Alan Wolfe writes ``As benefits a work of apologetics....'')

Here's the beginning of an article that appeared in June 1917 in the short-lived publication The Seven Arts (pp. 133-146). Entitled ``The War and the Intellectuals,'' it was contributed by Randolph S. Bourne:

To those of us who still retain an irreconcilable animus against war, it has been a bitter experience to see the unanimity with which the American intellectuals have thrown their support to the use of war-technique in the crisis in which America found herself. Socialists, college professors, publicists, new-republicans, practitioners of literature, have vied with each other in confirming with their intellectual faith the collapse of neutrality and the riveting of the war-mind on a hundred million more of the world's people. ...

I'm pretty sure ``new-republicans'' refers to those associated with TNR. Bourne was a regular contributor to TNR on a variety of subjects, though particularly on education; he was a popular advocate of John Dewey's educational theories. (John Dewey, incidentally, supported US entry into the war.) If you haven't heard of Randolph Bourne, one reason may be that he died at age 32, during the flu pandemic of 1918. Regarding Bourne's ``publicists'' and ``practitioners of literature,'' don't fret it much: Bourne was usually vague on what he meant by ``intellectual.'' For that matter, even in his own day few college professors could burnish the matte luster of that word.

There's a monthly that was launched around 1960 and published by the American Jewish Committee (AJC) called Commentary. (More at the link; it's now independent of the AJC.) Commentary also drifted (but much further) to the right. (I mean, every few years they publish an article arguing against evolution!) Frank Manciewicz is usually credited with the observation that The New Republic is like a Jewish Commentary. (The point presumably being that the subject matter and authors of Commentary are not particularly Jewish, and that the politics of TNR is much closer to that of American Jews. I think what this must all mean is that Commentary is the Canadian TNR.) Somewhere to the right of Commentary, politically, is JWR.

Frankly, the TNR-Commentary comparison has aged poorly, especially since TNR seems to have dispensed with copy-editors. A better comparison is provided by newish (since 1992?) First Things and Commonweal, each of which is something like a Catholic Commentary. There doesn't seem to be a Protestant version yet, or I'm not aware of it. There are, of course, generally Protestant journals that are more focused on religion. Approximations of FT/Commentary/Commonweal: Christianity Today (a monthly of Protestant evangelicals, founded in 1955) and the Christian Century (not very denominational, as the name implies; so leftist it holds out hope of salvation for Democrats).

I think that 2002 was the big shake-out year for journals, though many of the survivors have been shaky. TNR's circulation shrank from about 101,000 in 2000 to about 60,000 at the beginning of 2007. TNR's specific problem, however, may be political polarization. Between 2004 and 2007, the circulations of such liberal magazines as The Nation and The Progressive have increased. I think the conservative journals have just held their own -- Commentary, at least, has held steady at about 25 thousand. More centrist TNR has lost readership, consistent with the political-polarization storyline. In late February 2007, TNR announced a major overhaul, selling controlling interest to CanWest Global Communications and switching to fortnightly publication. (There, see? TNR is the Canadian TNR!)

My grandfather resided in the US for a while in the days after Prohibition was lifted. At the time, local jurisdictions had more stringent laws restricting the sale of alcohol. One such law in New York City allowed on-site consumption of alcohol only to accompany food. One way around this was simply to offer a ``free lunch'' to anyone buying a drink. My father says that this is the origin of the phrase -- lunch wasn't really free, you had to pay for the drink.

Still, market mechanisms intrude. My grandfather wasn't much of a drinker; he would resell his drink to someone who wasn't hungry, so lunch came out pretty cheap.

Hmm. It says here in You Might As Well Live (John Keats's book about Dorothy Parker) that in the gay nineties (that's the 1890's, son), a man could have a free lunch with a five-cent beer. Page 16.

     H C         NO
      3 \       /  ²
         \_____/
         / ___ \
O N_____/ /   \ \
 ²      \ \___/ /
         \_____/
               \
                \
                 NO
                   ²

Created in 1863 by J. Wilbrand. (At the time, in Germany, the name ended in the now no-longer-standard toluol, q.v.)

The 2,4,6- (for the positions of the nitro groups) is usually implicit, since a straightforward synthesis puts the groups preferentially at para and ortho positions.

In May 1998, Geri Halliwell achieved solo fame by leaving the phenomenally successful Spice Girls in mid-tour. That year, Aaron Spelling was casting for a new Charlie's Angels series and considered her for a part. She was rejected as too chunky, although in July it was reported that actor Randy Spelling, Aaron's son, had pleaded with dad to reconsider. In a few of the many stories about the Spice break, it was even rumored that the possibility of a role in the show contributed to Geri's decision to leave. In any event, an Angels remake didn't materialize that year. A big-screen version was filmed in 1999 (released 2000).

Since 2001, along with the other former Turner properties (TCM, TBS, Cartoon Network, the various CNN's), TNT has organizationally been a part of the WB network, which in turn is part of Time Warner.

There's a help page for the search engine on the Canadian Parliament website. One of the searching hints (``Be Accurate'') explains:

For example, if you wanted to look for information about Toronto, you would type Toronto, not the common abbreviation T.O. The Search Engine does not know that T.O [sic, I think it was] means Toronto and it will be unable to provide you with any results even though there are several documents that contain the word Toronto.

It may seem superfluous to point out that one should search on actual placenames rather than their abbreviations, but Torontonians use TO frequently without a second thought, about as New Yorkers use NYC. I seem to recall more than once being in a chatroom with mostly American chatters, where people from Toronto or thereabouts used TO in the apparent expection that it would be generally understood.

FWIW, a search on T.O. at the Canadian Parliament website (May 2004) did turn up five documents (in addition to the search help page itself): lists of members for eighth through twelfth parliaments (June 23, 1896 to October 6, 1917), when T.O. Davis served as a member of the House of Commons (8th and 9th; the 9th was dissolved Sept. 29, 1904) and then as a senator (10th-12th). Wilfred Laurier was prime minister during the 8th to the 11th parliaments. He's mentioned at the WLU entry. T.O. Davis is not.

As of 2009, all those interesting search tips are gone, and you only learn that the search is case- and accent-insensitive and similar boring stuff. It reminds me of a Dave Barry column (``Sweating Out Taxes'') that included this: ``The IRS spends God knows how much of your tax money on these toll-free information hot lines staffed by IRS employees, whose idea of a dynamite tax tip is that you should print neatly. If you ask them a real tax question, such as how you can cheat, they're useless.''

The comments about T.O. above occurred in the English help page, and the dead link above is to that. The corresponding French page with search help (dead link here) used the example of Mtl. in place of T.O. (Le moteur de recherche ne sait pas, lui, que Mtl désigne Montréal....) Searching on MTL yields three pages that mention Radio-Canada MTL.

La-da da-da dee, la-da da-da dah.

Cf. TOCS-IN.

It was the Summer of my contents. Garage-sale time.

There's a European mirror for TOCS-IN in Louvain.

When it was begun, the journals to be covered were divided into 16 files: 6 files of general classics journals (CLA), 5 of archaeology (ARCH), 3 for religion and Near Eastern studies (RLNE), and 2 for miscellaneous journals of interest (MISC).

A tod is really just a wool-specific alternate name for a quatern -- one quarter of a hundredweight (long). To be precise about ``approximately'': I mean that a tod was precisely 28 pounds, but the term was also used loosely, and in a weak market for wool, buyers might demand a half pound over. Sounds like price controls.

Overall score, originally in the range 200 to 677, was 10 × average of three section scores (20 to 68). They couldn't pick a system that didn't require roundoffs? No, they had to make it complicated. 660 is at the top percentile, top quartile is about 570, median is about 520. The graduate admissions office at Notre Dame interprets the range 535-600 as ``questionable ability.''

But wait! It gets worse. A computer-based test was introduced, with scores in the range 0 to 300. (Lowest score zero: what a clever innovation!) In order ``to avoid confusion'' (no thanks, really -- you've done enough), the scores on the paper-based test have been adjusted: scores between 200 and 310 on the old scale have been collaped up to 310 (fewer fine gradations between horrible and terrible). Since scores above 310 are not scaled, those higher scales still represent the same level of English incompetence they represented previously.

Some conversions:

Paper-based score    Computer-based score
       677                    300
       650                    280
       600                    250
       550                    213
       533                    200
       500                    173

You could get a better idea of a student's English competence in a one-minute conversation, but that wouldn't be standardized. (Then again, see the FMSS entry.)

Y'know, the toeful/toefl thing reminds me: a way to distinguish many Austrian surnames from German ones is that if they end in a consonant followed by el where you would expect a consonant followed by ee followed by el in ordinary German spelling, then it's Austrian (z.B.: Vogl in Österreich; Vogel in Deutschland). This rule is a lot more accurate than the TOEFL's.

ToGA! ToGA! ToGA! ToGA!

You can keep your ``Dale Crest'' and ``Republic Manor.'' ``Toll View'' suggests the idea that there's a price to be paid for everything -- even a mere view. Here's a thought. According to Peter De Vries, suburbs are named after what the developers destroyed to build them -- Rolling Acres, Forest Glen, and so forth.

I'd like to point out that ``Dale Crest'' was just an off-hand invention to suggest the oxymorons that result from the use of obscure (to the name coiners) words to make place names that sound antique, and hence established or upscale. (For a related phenomenon, see Mission Viejo entry.) It turns out that there's a Dale Crest in Texas, and many a Dalecrest elsewhere. I suppose some crest may be associated with a dale, or vice versa, but I'm inclined to doubt that the coinage is usually meant literally. ``Republic Manor'' occurs as an accidental collocation, but the name as such has apparently not been inflicted, yet, into the annals of um, um, Atlastry, or whatever the word is that I'm trying to recall. Gazetteer! The annals of gazetteering, or gazetteers, for short.

I should also note that I only have the De Vries quotation at second hand -- from a review by George Will of a book not by De Vries. De Vries was a novelist of the mid-twentieth century; it may be a while before I can track down the precise quotation.]

Oh, alright, let's get serious. Tolstoy, also transliterated Tolstoi, is the name of a noble Russian family. In addition to Count Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy (1828-1910), the other famous ones were named Aleksey. Count Aleksey Nikolayevich (1882-1945, some novels) and Count Aleksey Konstantinovich (1817-1875, light and heavy verse). On the evidence of the patronymics, there must have been an awful lot of Nicholases in the family (sure, I could find out, but I'm busy now, working on the glossary). It might go back to Count Peter Alexandrovich (1761-1844), who headed a government department under Czar Nicholas I. In addition to the fathers of Leo and one of the Alekseys, there was Leo's older brother Nicholay (when people aren't famous, they don't get domesticated names like Nicholas). Leo was a college drop-out living on family money, and his life was going nowhere. In 1851 he accompanied Nikolay (transliterated spellings are a lot like Middle English spellings -- whatever works, and even what doesn't) to the Caucasus, where he joined an artillery regiment and began writing. I should probably have made one of those Alekseys an Alexei or Alexey or Alexay. Variety is the spice of life.

Under the IUPAC rationalization of chemical nomenclature, use of the -ol ending (q.v.) was restricted to phenols and alcohols, and simple aromatic compounds got names ending in -ene. Since academic chemists adopted the new nomenclature with alacrity, while manufacturers and others not engaged primarily in chemical research were laggard or reluctant to switch names, there is a natural tendency for toluol (in current continued use) to refer to commercial-grade (i.e., not very high grade) purity of toluene.

Years ago there was a soap opera that was a spoof of soap operas, called ``Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman.'' Mary's mate, never seen without the baseball cap that symbolized his arrested emotional development, was called Tom.

The guy who played Tom was at ASU filming with Disney.

In F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Tom Buchanan is defined by what he did in college years before (play football).

Although there is essentially one ideographic character system in use throughout China, different regions use local languages or dialects so different as to make communication difficult. Some of the difference is in the use of different words indicated by different characters, but most of the difference amounts to a different pronunciation of the same characters. Part of the difference in pronunciation arises from the use of different tones, so to discuss particular tones one must specify which ``Chinese'' one means. The ``official'' Chinese, what one is assumed to mean when one uses the word in another language, is Mandarin. In Mandarin there are four tones:

	|		|		|		|
	|__		| /		|  /		|\
	|		|/		|\/		| \
	|		|		|		|

	 1		 2		  3		 4

This is about normal for Chinese languages: four tones or so. An outlier among Chinese languages is Cantonese, the language of a large southern province (traditionally called Canton in English, or Guangdong [approx. recollection] in one or another Romanization) around Hong Kong. To speakers of other Chinese languages, Cantonese-speakers often seem to be arguing, because of the large number of different tones they use. The precise number of tones used is a matter of some dispute. This is not so surprising: though most Anglophones know that the English alphabet has 26 distinct letters (a full deck, counting upper and lower cases separately), few know the number of different sounds distinguished in their pronunciation (for most dialects, it is over forty). Part of the confusion also is due to the fact that different sounds may or may not be considered equivalent. (This also has an analogue in English, in the situation of vowels. For example, the dialects of some English-speaking regions don't distinguish the pronunciation of two or all of ``merry,'' ``marry'' and ``Mary.'' If these all seem clearly different, then next Christmas turn on the TV and listen as Jimmy Stewart, playing George Bailey in `` It's A Wonderful Life'' (IAWL) goes shouting for ``Mary,'' played by Donna Reed. [Links are to the US mirror of The Internet Movie Database.]

Donna Reed was the homemaker icon of the 1950's, based especially on the strength of her performance in The Donna Reed Show from 1958 to 1966. In the eighties, we got Roseanne, Domestic Goddess (tm). In 1991, Amy Tan published The Kitchen God's Wife, and never once in that book does she acknowledge Roseanne.

Anyway...

One point of view is that Cantonese essentially has only one tone additional to those of Mandarin, but that it sounds like more because of the different initial attacks (in the musical sense) that are used. Also, somewhat different, um, versions of the tones are used for shorter than for longer words.

So about ``Tootsie'' (1982): Dustin Hoffman plays an unemployed actor (Michael Dorsey) who poses as a woman (Dorothy Michaels) to get acting work. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept of acting, this is a bit like double-escaping to pull a literal out through two levels of interpretation.

A movie that takes this to the next level was actually released earlier in 1982: in Victor/Victoria, Julie Andrews plays a soprano who finds work posing as a female impersonator. You wonder just how much of a challenge this would be.

Stay with me, now; this paragraph and the last are just as connected as any two consecutive paragraphs typically are, in this glossary. East Germany (when that existed) had a program of giving their competitive female athletes a little competitive edge: male hormones. It was a public relations campaign, you know? They wanted to show the world that even if their subjects couldn't sprint from East Berlin to West Berlin in thirty years, nevertheless the communist country had the best doping program in the world. Except that they were so modest that they denied having any such program. And you know that males and females both have ``male'' and ``female'' hormones -- the difference is quantitative, not qualitative, so it was hard to prove doping (especially with the technology then available). Instead, suspicious people pointed to suspicious signs, like the fact that the female East German swimmers had deep voices. To this, one East German coach gave the memorable answer: ``We came to swim, not to sing!'' (It works about as well in the German -- schwimmen, singen). I'm glad that I forgot to mention that at the 14.25 entry.

That Dustin Hoffman vehicle, BTW, costarred Jessica Lange, and Geena Davis had her first film role in it. It seems they didn't deploy the Doris Day contrast enhancement maneuver (casting an unattractive best friend to make the star look good). You have to figure that looking too good in a female impersonator role could be risky to an actor's career, unless he aspires to a Divine career. Then again, when it's been a couple of years since you co-starred in Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) and you haven't had any movie work, maybe risk is good.

A common clause in book contracts (the contracts between publishers and authors) stipulates that if the house leaves the book out of print (OOP), the author gets the rights back.

IMDB will calmly tell you about Linda Blair.

TOP is also used in football, where it's actually easier to measure accurately.

Along about now, if not earlier, you have probably been wondering at the amazing ability of the Stammtisch to bring you exquisitely recondite information, at the very reasonable price (nothing) that we charge (all major credit cards accepted, and excepted). Even though you have read about our practical yet utopian administrative structure, you yet wonder how we do it. Very well, because you've asked politely, we'll give one small example.

The particular entry you are reading now (TOPS) was developed with information from the ground transportation division of our international directorate for excellence in glossary entries (ISO 9000 mission statement available free on request; include $3000 for freight and handling). I should mention that the ground transportation research staff, as well as the editing staff and the staff of a number of our other divisions, is based in nearby Canada (.ca), because that's where he, er, I mean the volunteer staff, resides. The use of highly skilled and mysteriously motivated volunteer staff is one of the important ways we keep costs down. Another way is, I shell out for the web presence to feed my ego.

Now that you understand the broad outlines of our organizational structure, we can move on to the intelligence operation that retrieved this datum. It all began as the ground transportation research staff was perusing the hearings transcripts of the ongoing inquiry into a Southall crash on September 19, 1997 (seven dead and about 150 injured when a Swansea-to-Paddington passenger train collided with a freight train in west London).

Our alert researcher noticed that the capitalized character string TOPS, tagged in preliminary work as a probable acronym, occurred at least nine times in scattered places in transcripts of the hearings. The first time it came up, one of the line's controllers was being questioned:

|   A. ...
|      We also had what is known as a TOPS computer.  I can't tell
|      you what the T-O-P-S stands for but it's a realtime computer
|      which logs the departure and arrival of trains at various
|      locations...

Next, another controller was being questioned:

|   Q. You say in your statement that one thing you did do that
|      morning was to send out a message on the TOPS computer?
|      Can you help us with what TOPS stands for?
|
|   A. No.
|
|   Q. You are not alone.

A few days later, someone had apparently found out:

|   Q. You printed off the TOPS information, that's the Total
|      Operations Processing System information, to identify the
|      precise trains?
|
|   A. I did.

So now we, and you, know.

The transcript from which the text above is quoted amounted to well over 2.5 megabytes in plain text form. It was online at this now-dead link for awhile. It doesn't seem to be available online any more, but the final inquiry report, published in 2000, is available online as of early 2009 (312 pdf pages). [This document (full title The Southall Rail Accident Inquiry Report) has a glossary (pdf pp. 10-11) that expands TOPS incorrectly as ``Total Operating Processing System.''] Other rail informatics scholars, building on the foundation of our pioneering research, have raised TOPS research to the next level. Some of that research is summarized at its own Wikipedia page.

In both Biblical and Modern Hebrew, however, the most common use of torah is as a noun. To a speaker of almost any European language other than English, it is natural to use the infinitive as a noun, just as it is in Hebrew. In English, infinitives can function as nouns in sentences, and are sometimes recognized as nouns in isolation, but more usually the present participle (-ing) form is used. For example, in a letter to her niece Anna Austen in September 1814, Jane Austen wrote:

Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones. It is not fair-- He has fame and Profit enough as a Poet, and should not be taking the bread out of people's mouths-- I do not like him & do not mean to like Waverley if I can help it-- but I fear I must....

In this example, ``to write novels'' is a noun phrase in the SAE style, and the infinitive ``to write'' alone can also function as a noun. More common, certainly today, would be the noun phrase ``writing novels,'' using the present participle writing.

(This use of the present participle is an accident of etymology: the present participle, which typically ends in -nd in West Germanic languages, and the nominal form constructed on the verb, which typically ends in -nk or -ng, became conflated in English, so the nominal forms ending in -ing came to be used for the present participle. In Scotland, it took a hundred years after the unification of the Scottish and English crowns for the native -and present participle to disappear.)

Anyway, torah is an infinitive. (Strictly, it's a hifil-form infinitive. Other forms of the verb, with their own infinitives, correspond to related meanings expressed with modal auxiliaries in English. The Hebrew system is actually very similar to Russian verb conjugation.) So in English, this infinitive torah functioning as a noun has the natural translation `teaching.' Latinate nouns constructed on similar verbs include doctrine and instruction. It is in the sense of `teaching' that the word is understood as the name for various Jewish holy books. (In this use, it is capitalized in English; Hebrew has no majuscule-minuscule distinction.)

The word torah is now used in two kinds of conventional ways: as the designation of certain holy books, and for related sets of laws. Let's do the books first.

In the narrowest sense, torah refers to the ``Five Books of Moses'' or, from the Greek, Pentateuch: the first five books of the Jewish Bible or the Christian Old Testament. This meaning already occurs in other books of the Bible (Joshua 1:7, Ezra 3:2, 7:6, 8:1,8; Mal. 3:22), in a phrase translated `the Torah of Moses.' (I capitalize Torah as seems appropriate in English; Hebrew does not have a majuscule-miniscule distinction.)

In rabbinic literature, the word torah refers to successively larger sets of books: the Jewish Bible (``written Torah'') or the Jewish Bible and a certain interpretive literature that was developed on its basis by rabbis of about the 2nd c. BCE to the 6th c. CE. (The latter is called ``oral Torah'' because it was first transmitted orally for a number of years. In fact, the writing down of this oral law was originally forbidden, but after the Romans defeated and destroyed the Jewish state, and much of the Jewish people was dispersed around the Mediterranean, it was judged preferable, and therefore permitted, to write the law than to risk having Jews in the diaspora live in ignorance of it.)

Often the word torah is glossed as `law.' This is considered incorrect as regards the name of the Bible, but there are two ways in which it is correct. First, the word torah occurs well over 150 times in the Pentateuch with the sense of `law' or `regulation,' although it generally occurs as part of a construction referring to a particular law. For example, Lev. 7:1 describes ``the torah on guilt offerings,'' and the Septuagint translates torah there as nómos.

Also, it may be noted that even the parts of the Torah that do not contain explicit laws are relevant to and used for law. (That is, Bible content that is historical, biographical, or obscure -- for the last think Song of Songs, to say nothing of the Book of Daniel.) Various kinds of close textual analysis are traditionally applied by rabbinic scholars to infer answers to questions about Jewish law. You could call it tea-leaf reading, but then what would you say about emanations and penumbras of constitutional law that lead to the conclusion that states can make no law limiting abortion until the third trimester, eh?

1. Talc
2. Gypsum
3. Calcite
4. Fluorite
5. Apatite
6. Orthoclase [Feldpar]
7. Quartz
8. Topaz
9. Corundum
10. Diamond

Partisans of the teams of the University of Maryland call turtles ``terps,'' which is short for terrapins, the common team name. Must have a lot of resonance for the track team.

And in related news...
In most of the US, the term ladybug is preferred to ladybird (the prohibitive favorite in all Commonwealth countries). At least bug is more accurate than bird, but actual ladybugs are of both sexes. The nursery rhyme is adjusted too.

• ``Enter Sandman,'' Metallica.
• ``Bodies,'' Drowning Pool.
• ``Shoot to Thrill,'' AC/DC.
• ``Hell's Bells,'' AC/DC.
• ``I Love You,'' from the ``Barney and Friends'' children's TV show.
• ``Born in the USA,'' Bruce Springsteen.
• ``Babylon,'' David Gray.
• ``White America,'' Eminem.
• ``Sesame Street,'' theme song from the children's TV show.

The list was in a press release issued in December 2008. Reprieve is not a rock group, so it's not a matter of professional rivalry. Reprieve is a ``law group.'' Of course, a reprieve can also be a respite or a release.

You're probably wondering about the glaring omission of ``The Piña Colada Song'' (as it's known, give or take a tilde) of Rupert Holmes from the list above. The reason is simple. The detainees at Guantanamo and elsewhere do not qualify for protection under the terms of the Geneva convention because they are not ``enemy combatants'' in the traditional sense but more like ``terrorists'' or ``suspicious innocent bystanders'' as the case may be. Furthermore, because they are not in US territory they are afforded only limited protection by US law. That's why it's legal to play the songs listed above, so long as royalties are paid. It would also be legal to use the PC song, but interrogators feel that it would violate their personal ethics.

Other bands and artists whose music has been played frequently at U.S. detention sites: Aerosmith, Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Don McLean (probably for when the interrogators need to take a long bathroom break), Lil' Kim, Limp Bizkit, Meat Loaf, Rage Against the Machine, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Tupac Shakur. For local flavor, they might consider ``Guantanamera,'' written by José Fernández Díaz, as performed by the Sandpipers.

When the Atari ST was still being developed, the operating system had not been decided yet (CP/M68K was a strong contender). The folks developing the system interface (AES/VDI: Application Environment System/Video Display Interface) that would eventually run a version of Digital Research's GEM (Graphic Environment Manager) were working on MS-DOS machines until the actual hardware was locked down. Since they didn't know specifically what operating system they were coding for, their system diagrams and documentations just referred to it as ``The Operating System'' or ``TOS.'' Once it was decided that Atari would be writing their own OS (a Unix-like interface on an MS-DOS filesystem), it became known officially as TOS.

Later, revisionist forces within Atari decreed that TOS actually stood for ``Tramiel Operating System,'' after ``Mad'' Jack Tramiel, founder of Commodore and the guy who brought us the C64.

Jack Tramiel, after being driven out of Commodore by the board of directors, bought Atari from Warner (who couldn't manage a high-tech company to save their lives) and immediately announced his Mac-killer, the ST. The Atari ST became known in the press as the ``Jackintosh.'' The GEM interface was indeed so Mac-like that Apple successfully sued Digital Research on grounds of ``look and feel" and forced DR to modify (read: severely cripple) their DOS version of GEM. Since Atari had bought their version of GEM from DR, they were not affected by Apple's suit, and Apple never considered the Atari market enough of a threat to pursue Atari directly.

The long axis of Notre Dame's football stadium is aligned north-south, and a quarter mile or so directly north of it is the university's main library, Hesburgh Library. That thirteen-story structure has a mosaic covering most of the front wall, which faces south (i.e., in the direction of the stadium), dominated by an icon (in the usual sense) of Jesus. This image has its arms raised to indicate a touchdown, and the icon is informally but universally known as Touchdown Jesus. See the discussion at the entry for The Insider's Guide to the Colleges. See also First-Down Moses.

I don't care if it rains or freezes,
'Long as I got my plastic Jesus
Sittin' on the dashboard of my car.

The countable noun has the widely transferred sense of any object used as a test of quality. Its use in this sense for literary criticism today usually alludes to Matthew Arnold.

In 1880, Arnold wrote a preface to The English Poets, an important selection of verse edited by his niece's husband Thomas Humphry Ward. Arnold had his ``Preface to Ward's Poets'' reprinted as the first item in Essays in Criticism, Second Series (1888) under the title by which it is generally known today -- ``The Study of Poetry.'' In that essay, he proposed that a few short but distinctive passages of great poetry could serve as touchstones. Actually, he meant that they could be used as Munsell color chips, for comparison with some other work to be evaluated, but Munsell color chips hadn't been developed yet, and Arnold had a sure ear for the inappropriate but catchy name. He wrote

There can be no more useful help for discovering what poetry belongs to the class of the truly excellent, and can therefore do us the most good, than to have always in one's mind lines and expressions of the great masters, and to apply them as a touchstone to other poetry. Of course we are not to require this other poetry to resemble them; it may be very dissimilar. But if we have any tact we shall find them, when we have lodged them well in our minds, an infallible touchstone for detecting the presence or absence of high poetic quality, and also the degree of this quality, in all other poetry which we may place beside them.

The particular touchstones he proposed are eleven passages, one to four lines long, selected from Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton. Some of them are pretty good, though one can find far better than many of them elsewhere in the same authors, and better than most of them in Goethe. The restriction to short passages in principle seems to exclude the majesty of a truly ambitious metrical scheme such as one finds in, say, Pushkin's Eugene Onegin. But these are minor quibbles. There are really only two problems with Arnold's scheme, and they are

1. It can't work.
2. It doesn't work.

It can't work because it ignores the topology of quality. That topology is discrete and multidimensional; greatness in poetry is a matter of individual reception. It is true that mediocre poetry can be improved or worsened, generally speaking. There can often be broad agreement on the relative ranking of two similar ungreat works because compromise is unnecessary: one can substantially improve the poetry along one dimension of merit without substantially degrading it along other dimensions. However, it is a mistake to suppose that this defines a single scale of merit that can be extended out to the vicinity of greatness. When one reaches the realm of very good poetry, there are few choices (discreteness). Considering the few changes that might be deemed improvements, one finds that there are gains and losses. It must be so: if it were always possible to improve in all ways, the writing of great poetry would be as easy as bad poets suppose.

Arnold acknowledges that multidimensionality. (``Of course we are not to require this other poetry to resemble them; it may be very dissimilar.'') But he supposes that one can profitably compare extremely dissimilar beauties. Does keeping a few chords of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony on endless loop in my mind help me to appreciate a glorious sunrise? No. At best, it helps me enjoy the solar beauty by supplementing it with a wholly different one.

Many will find this criticism captious, supposing that there is some truth in Arnold's idea, even if there is some justice in my objection, some imperfection in his formulation. But the fact is that people's minds are clogged almost shut with ideas that might be true, that sound good, and that are so tenuously supported that there is nothing to kick out from under them. Isaiah Berlin's fox-and-hedgehog idea is similar: a baldly false general assertion that it is perfectly possible, by the complete suspension of one's critical faculties, to believe and enjoy.

Now I want to address the second assertion briefly. It may seem mystical to consider whether a method does work after arguing that it cannot, but it is not mystical. It is scientific. The scientific worldview recognizes that deductive proofs are no stronger, and often weaker, than their imprecise and uncertain premises. Hence, one tests the conclusions anyway. Matthew Arnold himself provides an excellent test. We will not dwell on the low opinion he had, say, of Robert Burns. We give a pass also to his conflation of moral and aesthetic qualities (``the truly excellent ... do[es] us the most good''), and his bias for dripping sentiment. Suffice only to say that all the touchstones in the world can never help a blind man tell white from yellow. Arnold had a tin ear, and his own wretched poetry proves it (read the maximum tolerable dose here). Even the inventor of the method couldn't use it to see that it would be aesthetically (and morally) wrong to inflict his scribbles on posterity.

Oh yes, you will encounter Matthew Arnold partisans -- people who do not realize just how awful he was as a poet. A relatively mild example of the hagiographic tendency is The Touchstones of Matthew Arnold, by John Shepard Eells, Jr. (NYC: Bookman Associates, Inc., 1955). On page 14, Eells wrote

One rarely finds a poet who is articulate about the secrets of his craft; and when the poet is a great one, and an eminent critic as well, his utterances dealing with that craft cannot but command the deepest interest and attention. Such an utterance is The Study of Poetry...

One of the better gags in ``Kentucky Fried Movie'' involved the martial-arts instructor's ``we must have totow concentwayshun'' boilerplate. It worked out better with the dog.

1. The religion of Tours, France.
2. Having Tourette's syndrome (TS).
3. The opposite of defensive driving.

Here are some very old resource links, shamelessly copied from the Crimean Travel Server Homepage, English version:

• World Tourism Organization - WTO
• Pacific Asia Travel Association - PATA
• American Society of Travel Agencies - ASTA
• Japan National Tourist Organization - JNTO
• Caribbean Tourism Organization - CTO
• Tourism Industry Association of Canada - TIAC
• US Travel & Tourism Administration - USTTA

Paul Fussell edited a collection of travel writing called The Norton Book of Travel (1987). From his introduction to Part IV, ``Touristic Tendencies,'' here is the second paragraph, representative of his attitude regarding a certain distinction:

    Tourism simulates travel, sometimes quite closely. You do pack a suitcase or two and proceed abroad with passport and travelers checks. But it is different in crucial ways. It is not self-directed but externally directed. You go not where you want to go but where the industry has decreed you shall go. Tourism soothes you by comfort and familiarity and shields you from the shocks of novelty and oddity. It confirms your prior view of the world instead of shaking it up. Tourism requires that you see conventional things, and that you see them in a conventional way.

Toxo causes a number of neurologically based muscle weakness, incoördination, seizures, transient mental status changes and sustained cognitive impairment.

Gravitational/Zoological: If even one cat has access to TP DtF, then from time to time (about as often as the roll is replaced), the TP will be found lying in a scratched heap on the floor. This has less to do with gravity in general than with the way cats scratch (with a pulling motion), so it really would not be appropriate to call this the Newton's Cat argument. Also, Sir Isaac Newton had a dog. Few English-speaking people kept cats as pets in those days. [Newton's dog was named Diamond. There's a story that once the dog knocked over a lamp (Domestic animals always get blamed -- cf. Mrs. O'Leary, and consider the scape goat), and he (Newton, not the dog) exclaimed: ``O Diamond! Diamond! thou little knowest the mischief done!'' as years of work went up in flames. However, what probably happened was that the fire broke out while Newton was at church. This is interesting, because after his secret conversion, Newton attended the Trinitarian (state-sanctioned) church only the bare minimum number of times per year required by law. (Which was not zero.) Newton was a very deeply religious man compared to, say, William Godwin or Bertrand Russell, but that wasn't unusual in those days and probably still isn't, and maybe the TP entry is not the best place to get into it.] Now there are more cats than dogs in the US, but the dogs are mostly bigger, so there's still more dog than cat in the US.

Aesthetic: DtF tends to display the tear-edge at the end of the roll, hanging down. In DtB configuration, the roll may appear seamless.

Athletic: One-handed operation of a standard-issue TP dispenser requires a rapid jerk on an unrolled portion of the TP, with the opposed force arising inertially from the remaining rolled portion. This maneuver is harder to execute with DtB than with DtF, because DtB requires the roll to be jerked upward or, if jerked downward, starting from a lower position.

Etiquette: Oh, excuse ME! Of course I meant to use the words bathroom tissue. One would not want to be coarse in this department.

Microelectronic: When TP dispensers have embedded microprocessors, this will no longer be a problem. For the next few months, however, people with cats or who for some irrational cause insist on DtB will simply have to install centrifugal governors on their dispensers, like the one on Watt's steam engine.

Then, of course, there's always the Toilet Seat Position Controversy Here's a calculation.

For some serious historical information, try this page. If you have a nonvirtual existence, you might consider visiting Wisconsin's Madison Museum of Bathroom Tissue, which in 1997, after four years of existence, had already collected three thousand rolls, including a roll from Graceland. It's still not listed at <MuseumSpot.com>.

UPDATE: Tragic news -- The Madison Museum of Bathroom Tissue went down the drain. Visit this virtual tribute instead. (Consolation: there's a toilet-seat museum in San Antonio, Texas.)

I knew a woman who spent a year as a student in Leningrad in the seventies. When she visited any neighboring Baltic republic, she would befriend the hotel personnel by badmouthing the Russians, and she would be rewarded with TP. In an emergency, of course, there was always Pravda.

I seem to recall that this glossary set out once to be a scientific resource. Very well: the 500X magnification picture of (unused, I think) toilet paper below is an SEM image mirrored from <http://www.mos.org/sln/sem/tpaper.html>

In her stepfather's tailor shop many years ago, among the seamstresses my mother worked with was an elderly German lady, once wealthy but now in embarrassed circumstances. She had been so genteel that she could not bring herself to be seen buying toilet paper (my mother bought it for her). Lord, the past is a foreign country. Argentina, in this case. (It amuses speakers of other Romance tongues that in Spanish embarazo is `pregnancy.') Then again, perhaps the relevant nationality is German. In that case, it would make sense (trust me on this) to visit the turd de force entry.

Gombrowicz's Ferdydurke is one of the great world novels, according to Milan Kundera. In it, Mrs. Youthful displays as one of the marks of modernity ``her casual way of heading for the toilet, where till then people had gone in secret.''

On your next virtual vacation, you really should visit the Virtual Toilet Paper Museum. After all, when you gotta go, you really gotta go.

This reasoning is rather different from the motivation for the braiding found in Litz wire.

For examples in various bulk compound semiconductors:

• D. G. Seiler, C. L. Littler and D. Heiman, J. Appl. Phys. 57, p. 2191 (1985).
• Ch. Neumann and A. Nöthe, Europhys. Lett. 4, p. 351 (1987).
• Ch. Neumann, A. Nöthe, and N. O. Lipari, Phys. Rev. B 37, p. 922 (1988).

TPC-A simulates a lot of users connected to a system all doing the same job.
TPC-B tries to stimulate one power-mad user. Probably a quantum chemist or a band theorist.
TPC-C simulates a lot of users connected to a system doing a variety of jobs. This is pretty stupid, because most users most of the time are running a browser.

The ``Total'' here refers to the idea that one should optimize globally rather than locally. That is, using performance measurements that focus on individual departments may lead to suboptimization: good local performance at the expense of the overall system. The trouble is, everyone knows that being a team player and trading-off performance for the greater good of the team is just going to land you in trouble.

When I became an assistant professor and attended my first reeducation camp, err, sorry, teaching effectiveness training, I underwent a despicable demonstration of this technique by a biology professor who is a darling of the teaching-effectiveness imbeciles.

A normal solar cell is basically a thin semiconductor diode, and is prevented in principle from making use of the full energy carried by the solar spectrum because of two factors:

1. The photons whose energy is smaller than the semiconductor bandgap are wasted: they can't excite electrons across the gap.
2. The photons with energy exceeding the gap have some of their energy wasted as well. All of the photon energy in excess of the bandgap energy goes into kinetic energy of electrons and holes, and most of that goes quickly into heating the lattice (``nonradiative relaxation'').

One solution to these problems is to stack different photovoltaics. The light is incident on the wide-gap photovoltaic cell, which makes better use of the high-energy photons and lets the lower-energy photons pass through. The narrow-gap PV makes use of the lower-energy photons. In practice, this scheme has not been very popular. In addition to the greater costs and fabrication complexity of stacking different semiconductors, there are also greater losses due to partial reflection of incident light.

Okay, this entry is back under construction.

Denotatively, of course, ``total quality'' and ``new improved'' both mean nothing.

Another aspect of the ``total quality'' slogan that is quite effective is its big-lie magnitude. If one claims to have a single new idea of limited significance, then there is the danger that someone might ask for an explanation of the idea in terms that can be understood and laughed at. More wisely, if one claims to have a brilliant revolutionary idea, like ``Total Quality'' or ol' Kim Il Sung's ``Jutche Idea,'' then the target of propaganda is likelier to be cowed into silence, and the few requests for explanation can be more easily parried with perorations on the multifarious benefits of applying the unexplained brilliant idea. You know, deconstruction is a lot like that.

Catbert offers a Mission Statement Generator. Hey -- leverage the synergy, you never know.

• the management of partial quality, whatever that is,
• management quality is partial, to the boss's nephew, presumably (as if that were special)

• the partial management of quality.

There have been other ideals of leadership.

If you would like to observe the banality of insipidness, one place to start is this.

Okay, okay, here's something more to the point: TQM is a management philosophy (right there you know you're in trouble; each of those words can be pretty bad news alone). It was developed in the 1950's by geniuses like W. Edwards Deming, J. M. Juran, and Phillip B. Crosby. Its basic premise is that improvements in quality automatically lead to improvements in productivity. It's big on incremental quality improvements and teamwork. Japanese industry was an early adopter. Japan has been stagnating economically, nominally in and out of recession, since the real estate bubble burst around 1990, writing as of 2001. LDP remains in power.

The soc.culture.turkish newsgroup has an online FAQ.

In 2004, Turkey finally began accession talks with the EU. The joke goes that ``Turkey is an Occident waiting to happen.''

It was quite unusual for the famous conservationist president to be photographed with wildlife that he had not first killed. For that matter, James J. Audubon, after whom a road near the UB North campus is named, used to shoot his birds first. This made them much easier to study at close hand. Since his time, the gun clubs he began have changed their name to ``The Audubon Society.''

Don't say ``this one's on me'' in Tokyo until you convert the prices. It only looks like everything is priced in Italian lire, but the yen is dearer by an order of magnitude.

The great tragedy of Science -- the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.

In act 4 of ``Man and Superman'' (1903), Shaw wrote:

There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart's desire. The other is to get it.

Just that he was a pagan is really a pretty low-down, pettifogging excuse not to make him the patron saint of facial hair.

The Old French verb evolved into the French trancher, which was borrowed by 1513 to produce the English verb tranch (also originally spelled traunche). Tranch had the narrow sense of carve applied to a fish (somehow usually a sturgeon). The word is attested as recently as 1840, but is obsolete today. A noun tranche (same spelling as the French noun) also occurred in the same period and is attested as recently as 1894 in the general sense of slice or cut piece (usually of food, it seems). Then, beginning in 1930, the noun tranche reappears primarily in financial contexts, with senses described in the next entry. My guess is that the word was reborrowed from the French rather than resurrected and repurposed entirely within English, but it's hard to know.

While not every case of tinnitus has an apparent source, there are a variety of causes. Exposure to loud noise, either over an extended period of time or one extreme incident, is probably the most common. Other possible causes of tinnitus include: certain medical conditions; certain medications; allergies.

This ``three-year colloquium'' business is a standard format for the APA. Strictly speaking, however, it runs from 1998 to 2001: APA annual meetings have traditionally been held just before New Year's (since classicists are traditionally such heavy drinkers that if it were held shortly after New Year's, too many talks would have to be canceled due to hang-overs and missed flights). The meeting that would normally year 2000, however, has been shifted to early 2001. This was done to avoid the pedants' version of the Y2K problem: in the year 2000, any classicist who absentmindedly implies that he thinks 2000 was part of the twenty-first century is humiliated. If this happened in public it would be unbearable. In the future, meetings will have to continue at the beginning of the year, since otherwise there'd be a year with two meetings. People would throw out announcements for the second ``APA Annual Meeting 2001,'' thinking they were late-arriving announcements for the previous meeting (that happens too).

Cf. opacity.

trapezoid -
(US) a quadrilateral with exactly one pair of parallel sides;
(UK) a quadrilateral with no parallel sides.

trapezium -
(UK) a quadrilateral with exactly one pair of parallel sides;
(US) a quadrilateral with no parallel sides.

Euclid used _trapezium_ (i.e., trapezion) for both figures, but Proclus's 5th century commentaries on Euclid distinguished them, using the current UK sense. This sense was maintained in various languages until 1795, when Hutton's Mathematical Dictionary was published (in Britain) and stated that the reversed (current US) meanings were ``sometimes'' used.

Hutton's dictionary was so influential that the reversed meanings became prevalent (!), though not universal, for the next 80 years. After that time the old meanings seemed to reassert themselves -- in the UK but not in the US.

At least it's no longer a coyly anonymous feature, as it was until the eighties.

In 1923 the BRT was renamed Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit (BMT) company, q.v.

This trend will continue until, like every trend, it stops.

Well, not quite exactly, I guess, since the vowel sounds are slightly different. But other than that -- oh, yeah, the r sound is very different, but it's still an r sound. Of course, the t in French is articulated a bit more softly than in English, but apart from the fact that French initial t is never aspirated and English initial t always is, pretty much, it's the same sound. And even if it isn't, it doesn't really matter, since the t in ``tr'' represents a ``ch'' sound in English (though not in French).

I should probably mention the rock group here too. T. Rex fossils are mostly found in certain rock strata corresponding to its era, but that's not what I mean.