Different Semitic alphabets have, to a great extent, the same letters in the same order. (Yes, we're still in the 0 entry. Keep reading.) The first letter of every Semitic alphabet is (AFAIK) the same, typically transliterated aleph for Hebrew and Aramaic, alif for Arabic, alep for Phoenician, etc. The earliest forms of the letter resembled an ox head, and the name of the letter meant ox. As the glyph became less of a picture and more of an abstraction, it came to look like a Roman (avant la lettre, if you will pardon the expression) capital letter A, or a numeral 4, knocked over on its side (usually knocked over to point left).

One of the most common changes that befell the glyphs of alphabetic characters was rotation. For example, the Roman letter L is essentially a capital lambda rotated a third of a turn counterclockwise. (In Etruscan and Oscan, it was rotated in the other direction, so it mirrored the Roman L, but Etruscan and Oscan were written right-to-left.) By the time the Greeks adapted some Semitic alphabet (probably the Phoenician), the early aleph was rotated into what we would recognize as an A. (And its name became alpha. That name, as pronounced by the ancient Greeks, would be transcribed by English-speakers as ``alpa.'')

The letter aleph is a sort of nothing consonant. In transliteration to Western languages, it usually disappears. The articulation that aleph represents is an unvoiced glottal stop consonant. At the beginning of a word, what aleph indicates to the usual European way of thinking is just that the word begins with a vowel. In the middle of a word, aleph may indicate the presence of a diphthong or hiatus, or it may be inserted as a hint (matres lectionis) to indicate a vowel ah.

Semitic languages do not generally indicate vowels, although many ``pointing'' systems (small marks surrounding the letters) were developed to indicate vocalization (vowels), cantillation, and punctuation. One system (or three), the Tiberian, became dominant in Hebrew starting around 1200 CE, and is used today for children's primers, poetry, and prayer books. Semitic languages don't have very many consonant clusters, so when you see the consonants of a word you have a pretty good idea where the vowels go. Various hints, and the simple fact that there are only so many words, make it possible to fill in the missing vowels. In Greek, on the other hand, not indicating vowels is not an option, but indicating the glottal stop was evidently not a priority. When the alphabet was adapted to Greek, characters were developed for six vowels, and aleph was retasked for the ah sound (and renamed alpha, as you know if you have any short-term memory).

In Hebrew, the name of the letter aleph is written aleph-lamed-phe. One other letter has a name that is spelled with an initial aleph: aleph-yod-nun, spelling ayin. Ayin is the sixteenth letter of the Hebrew alphabet, and I'll only get in trouble if I try to explain how anyone pronounces it, but it's one of those ``silent'' letters. In Hebrew, the word ayin means `nothing.'

Let's face it, this is a stupid term, used by people who just want to be cute. If you mean a constant or a subroutine call, say that. If you want to be clever, contemplate n-ary functions with n not a natural number (negative integer or imaginary number is too easy; try a fractional argument count, then advance to irrationals).

True, a few negligible "()" (or ()-like) languages -- APL, awk, C, and Perl, possibly one or two others -- don't distinguish between function calls and subroutines. However, this doesn't release you from the commandment to call them by the proper names set down in the original FORTRAN definition as communicated to IBM by God.

Synonyms for 0-ary are nillary and nullary. The silliness of these terms confirms the inappropriateness of using the term function in these cases. If something is explicitly a function of nothing, then it's not a function of anything.

APL uses the -adic suffix to form its set of silly words -- niladic, monadic, dyadic, ... The advantage of this system is that monadic can be mistaken easily for monastic and nomadic. The usage also happens to coincide (from dyadic and triadic on) with a conventional terminology for linear matrix operators. APL is (or was when implemented) very strong on matrix operations.

... My own experience suggests that you can use Rorty as a great source on difficult thinkers like Heidegger or [Wilfred] Sellars,'' says [Daniel] Dennett. ``And if you multiply what he says by the number .673''--which Dennett playfully calls the ``Rorty Factor''--``then you get the truth. Dick always exaggerates everything in the direction of the more radical.''

      Stauncher critics maintain that the Rorty Factor is considerably smaller. As the New York University philosopher Paul Boghossian remarks, Rorty faces the perilous task of rejecting the notion of objective truth while avoiding the charge that his own views are thus untrustworthy. ``I just think he has never really pulled off the trick,'' Boghossian says. ``I don't think that anybody has, but in particular I don't think that he has.''

I haven't seen any numerical estimates of the O'Reilly Factor. I did, however, see the figure of $60,000,000 bruited about.

Blackballed from the prime numbers fraternity. (Why not admit that the only positive factors of 1 are 1 and itself?)

'one' is the new railway franchise for the East of England, providing all services from London Liverpool Street.

To maximize confusion, they don't capitalize the name. Obviously, this name was chosen because it was the one with the greatest comedic possibilities. They plan to take the show on the road.

``It's almost seven twenty-one! Of course you've missed the seven-twenty one train. Please be more prompt.''

Obviously this sort of thing can only be confusing four times an hour (not counting ``seven-thirteen one,'' etc.). But they have other ways of making you late. ``I'm sorry: if you want to buy a ticket for one, then I can only sell you a ticket for one. Tee-hee! One way?''

The one naming began on one April two thousand and four, probably because this was so cute, with the name and day and all. Tra-la! On day one, the new name was a little cute and a lot stupid. The next day, it was no longer cute. It's a miracle if they haven't renamed at least one station ``next.'' (You know sometimes nowadays they give ballplayers peculiar names.)

I say, pronounce it as it's spelled: ``own.''

1. First Base[man].
2. Hit for a single.

Collectors tend to go principally for these, except in the case of very early or otherwise very rare or valuable books. To a collector, the first edition is really the first printing of the first edition, or at worst the first edition in the strictest sense (i.e., excluding any print runs in which any minor typographical corrections may have been made).

Book-club editions are generally reprints, more cheaply bound than the original, with very little collector value. They are often marked ``First Edition.'' A strong sign that a volume is a book-club edition is a blind stamp (usually a small square or circle on the back cover).

Umm, we're talkin' hardcovers here, you know. When the paperback was invented early in the twentieth century, it was for cheap reprints of, err, quality books, and for cheap potboilers and such. It was only late in the century (1980's, say) that quality mass-market books began to have paperback first editions. Nevertheless, there appears to be a significant market for 1950's science fiction in paperback.

A good place to find out what a used book is worth is <BookFinder.com>. Although that is not specialized in collectors editions, it can search the inventories of over 30,000 used-book stores. A common reference for collectors is the annual Huxford's Old Book Value Guide. For more on finding books, new and used, see our Books Stores entry.

Good old theoretical hydrogen, anyway. Good old conventional practice also doesn't distinguish carefully between 1H and H. Commercially available hydrogen is a mix of isotopes. ``Ultra-depleted'' protium water is available on the market with deuterium concentration as low as 1 ppm.

In the late eighties IUPAC promulgated some systematic nomenclature for discussing hydrogen species and processes specifically and generically. The terms included hydron as a generic hydrogen nucleus, modeled very reasonably on the pattern of proton, deuteron, and triton. Excuse me while I go and express my opinion of this name to the porcelain throne.

If that link is dead, see

1. IUPAC-IUB Joint Commission on Biochemical Nomenclature (JCBN), and Nomenclature Commission of IUB (NC-IUB), Newsletter 1989; Arch. Biochem. Biophys., vol. 272, pp. 262-266 (1989); Biochem. Internat., vol. 20, pp. 209-214 (1989); Bioch. J., vol. 265, I-IV (1989); Biol. Chem. Hoppe-Seyler, vol. 370, pp. 1153-1156 (1989); Eur. J. Biochem., vol. 183, 1-4 (1989).
2. IUPAC Commission on Physical Organic Chemistry (CPOC) Names for hydrogen atoms, ions, and groups, and for reactions involving them, Pure Appl. Chem. vol. 60, 1115-1116 (1988).

Oh, what the hey, here's the lot, with further (SBF) recommendations:

	General	1H	2H	3H	Oh, it was an eta?
Atom (H)	hydrogen	protium	deuterium	tritium	William
Cation (H+)	hydron	proton	deuteron	triton	Neptune's
Anion (H-)	hydride	protide	deuteride	tritide	neap tide
Group (-H)	hydro	protio	deuterio	tritio	Trimalchio
Transfer of cation to substrate	hydronation	protonation	deuteronation	tritonation	detonation, pronation, alien nation
Replacement of hydrogen by a specific isotope		protiation	deuteriation (or deuteration)	tritiation	adulteration, titillation, deterioration

A dark-adapted human eye can detect a light flash at a threshold of about 100 photons at the cornea. Only about half of those make it to the retina; maybe 30 are absorbed by rods in the retina (evolution has left us with the rods pointing backwards, so light has to go not just to but partly through the retina). The usual claim (in a correct formulation) is that a rod can detect a single photon. This only means that in the conscious detection of a single light pulse, the various rods that contribute to the nervous signal each react to the absorption of only one photon each (in most detection events). One rod detecting one photon would not register consciously: the retinal as well as the cerebral circuitry conspire to ignore low-level signals that could as well be noise.

The actual quantum efficiency of rods is hard to measure, but seems to be about 50%. I.e., there's about a 50% chance that if a single photon is absorbed by a rod, it will produce an elementary electrical signal.

Rod response is delayed by about 0.2 seconds; cone response by 0.1 sec or less. Actually, this is peak response. If you imagine that you ``trigger'' on the leading edge when current shift exceeds noise level by a factor of two, the numbers are more like 0.15 and 0.05 sec, resp.

Details can be found in Stevens' Handbook of Experimental Psychology, 2/e, Vol. 1, (1988) pp. 125ff. Thresholds for conscious awareness or detection of light are determined in human experiments. For ethical and practical reasons, however, other components of this research are done with vertebrates such as frogs and monkeys. Nocturnal animals presumably have better overall response.

Okay, quickly now, before the system hangs: Phylacteries are boxes and leather straps that one (one Orthodox Jew, actually, in the only instances I'm aware of) wears while saying a prayer to the effect that the prayer shall not be forgotten. It's sort of a self-referential performative statement. (And the Talmud is a paper hypertext, but that's another entry.) The boxes contain a scrap or two of prayer, but which prayer has varied a little. It hasn't always been the prayer that you will use phylacteries.

Tefillin is an Aramaic plural, not Hebrew, which is why it ends in the en nasal consonant (like Arabic male plurals) instead of em (i.e., instead of ending in the Hebrew male plural inflection -im).

Cf. 4QSf, 7QaskY.

Originally designated 1Q28a, in connection with which, see the next entry.

The numbering of these items is pretty addled, as you can see. The ``S'' in 1QS^b comes from the fact that this was originally called 1Q28b, and the original 1Q28a became 1QS^a.

(A rerun of `` Top Ten Numbers From One To Ten.'')

When [Jorge Luis] Borges's mother, doña Leonor Acevedo, dies at age 99, she has already lain weak and prostrate on her bed for quite a while. Her moans had filled the house. One unimaginative person, expressing his condolences to Borges, said it was a shame that she was unable to reach the century mark. So Borges replied, ``it seems to me that you exaggerate the charms of the decimal system....'' (According to Alicia Jurado, 1980.)

(Look, don't complain about the translation. A more literally accurate translation would contain and suppress information, and use modes of expression unusual in English, that would seem inappropriately odd in ways that the original is not odd.)

From Borges Verbal, by Pilar Bravo and Mario Paoletti (Buenos Aires: Emecée, 1999), p. 183:

Cuando muere la madre de Borges, doña Leonor Acevedo, a los noventa y nueve años, llevaba ya tiempo tullida y prostrada en la cama. Sus ayes se oían por toda la casa. Una persona sin imaginación, al darle pésame a Borges, le dijo que era una pena que no hubiera podido llegar a los cien años. Y entonces Borges le contestó: ``Me parece que usted exagera los encantos del systema decimal...''
(Contado por Alicia Jurado, 1980).

(Borges Verbal is an alphabetized selection of excerpts from interviews of Borges. There also exist alphabetized selections of his published opinions, and he himself published an alphabetized selection of his opinions. It seems to be catching. Since I first put in this entry, two relevant things have happened. (1) In Chile, my aunt Laura died somewhat shy of her 103rd birthday, and (2) right here in the virtual country inhabited by your faithful glossarist, I discovered that the authors of Borges Verbal sometimes took surprising liberties with Borges's words as originally published. For example, Bravo and Paoletti's entry for Germany includes the following sentence (pp. 38-9):

Lo que también se da en los alemanes es el respeto de la autoridad, una suerte de respeto chino de las jerarquías, (olvidando) que las jerarquías se deben al azar.

This sentence comes from the third of seven interviews Borges granted to Fernando Sorrentino, transcribed from tape and first published in 1974. Borges Verbal gives the source as [Siete conversaciones con Jorge Luis Borges (Buenos Aires: El Ateneo)]. (The 1996 edition is cited; I checked the 1973 and 2001 editions, where the relevant text is at pp. 64 and 124, resp.).

Lo que también se da en los alemanes --y lo que ciertamente no se dio en Schopenhauer-- es el respeto de la autoridad, una suerte de respeto chino de las jerarquías, el hecho de darles una gran importancia a los títulos de las personas. Creo que, en ese sentido, somos mucho más escépticos que los alemanes: comprendemos que las jerarquías se deben a las circunstancias y que las circunstancias se deben al azar.

Part of the IEEE 802.3 standard. ``ThinNet'' or ``CheaperNet.''

A majority of schools that use the three-digit numbers also use the hundreds digit to indicate level. Introductory courses are usually 100-level, occasionally 200-level, upper-level courses 300, 400, and graduate courses 500 and up. It's not just informative; it also simplifies the formulation of course requirements and course-credit rules. There is also a tendency for the smaller values of the two-digit remainder after the hundreds to be allocated first to the most fundamental or essential courses within a department's discipline, with narrower-interest courses being assigned larger-decade numbers (if only because they were introduced later). So a course numbered 101 is an introductory-level course, typically in a basic or general-interest topic. Courses are also (informally and sometimes officially) called by number with the course subject or short title rather than the department -- e.g., ``Mechanics 101,'' taught by a physics or mechanical engineering department. The preceding ought to pretty much explain the practice of suggesting that something is elementary knowledge by referring it to a fictitious course like ``Turning-on-your-flashlight 101.'' (Cf. Falling on the Floor.)

Don't tell me all this is obvious, or I'll just bleat on explaining more, such as that ``zero-hundred'' numbers (001, 002, ... 099) are widely used for remedial courses. In fact, I'd like to point out that odd numbers are normally used for Fall-semester courses and even numbers for Spring, when it is possible to do this (which is usually), and successive semesters of year-long sequences (especially of lower-level courses) typically have consecutive numbers. Most Summer courses are accelerated versions of regular-semester courses, so they can be assigned their usual numbers. I'm explaining the obvious because someone from outside North America actually emailed me asking what that 101 stuff meant. Don't hold me to the prevalence judgments (``most,'' ``usually,'' ``sometimes,'' etc.); I'm just writing this off the top of my head after spending more than half my life in universities. You could say I spent my life preparing for this moment, and now that it's over, I don't know what to do with myself any more. Of course, you could say a lot of things, but this one isn't quite true. My mission continues!

Here is a historical hypothesis: given that the manufacturer must service a few orders of magnitude of resistance, there is some advantage in minimizing the number of different values used. One achieves this by selecting a largest allowable ``distance'' between resistor values, so there will always be a standard value that is ``close,'' and making a set of resistors whose values are ``equally spaced.'' The metric that one uses to measure distance in resistance values is fractional deviation. That is, logarithmic difference (the logarithm of the ratio). Concretely, a 5-ohm deviation from a 22-ohm resistor is as significant as a 50-ohm deviation from a 220-ohm resistor. Therefore, stock resistance values should be equally spaced on a logarithmic scale. This is what has been done here, so successive resistance values are in an approximately constant ratio [10^(1/12) = 1.2115]. This is shown in the first column below.

10/8.2= 1.220
12/10 = 1.200  (11/10 = 1.100, 15/11 = 1.364) (13/10 = 1.300, 15/13 = 1.154)
15/12 = 1.250  (14/12 = 1.166, 18/14 = 1.286) (16/12 = 1.333, 18/16 = 1.125)
18/15 = 1.200  (17/15 = 1.133, 22/17 = 1.294) (19/15 = 1.267, 22/19 = 1.158)
22/18 = 1.222  (21/18 = 1.166, 27/22 = 1.227) (23/18 = 1.278, 27/23 = 1.174)
27/22 = 1.227  (26/22 = 1.182, 33/26 = 1.269) (28/22 = 1.273, 33/28 = 1.179)
33/27 = 1.222  (32/27 = 1.185, 39/32 = 1.219) (34/27 = 1.259, 39/34 = 1.147)
39/33 = 1.182  (38/33 = 1.152, 47/38 = 1.237) (40/33 = 1.212, 47/40 = 1.175)
47/39 = 1.205  (46/39 = 1.179, 56/46 = 1.217) (48/39 = 1.231, 56/48 = 1.167)
56/47 = 1.191  (55/47 = 1.170, 68/55 = 1.236) (57/47 = 1.212, 68/57 = 1.193)
68/56 = 1.214  (67/56 = 1.196, 82/67 = 1.224) (69/56 = 1.232, 82/69 = 1.188)
82/68 = 1.206  (81/68 = 1.191,100/81 = 1.235) (83/68 = 1.221,100/83 = 1.205)

The question arises whether one could do better. The answer depends on precisely what one takes as a measure of goodness. Part of the answer is that in twelve independent ratios in a decade, equal numbers are above and below the target value. Another way is to consider the effect of making a single change. The columns of parenthesied quantities show what would be the effect, on ratios with adjacent values, of changing any single value by one unit. For example, the fourth row begins with the ratio of the fourth (18) to the third (15) numbers. The next column in that row shows the effect of taking a smaller value (17) for the fourth number, and the last column shows the effect of increasing it.

Typical interpolated sequence for high-precision resistors (e.g. carbon film): 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, 16, 18, 20, 22, 24, 27, 30, 33, 36, 39, 43, 47, 51, 56, 62, 68, 75, 82, 91.

But thinking about it, I wonder if it really takes all that long to brush one's teeth. I think a reasonably conscientious person spends less than thirty minutes per day brushing her teeth. Why not offer a more generous 1050 hours, or even 1065 for denture-wearers? Heck, they could offer 1080 hours, for people who brush while browsing!

(x*24 = 1000 + x: x = 1000/23 = 43.478260869565217391304347826087)

This scroll fragment, also designated 11Q5, was the largest shown at the Public Museum of Grand Rapids (Michigan) during the exhibit February 16 through June 1, 2003.

If you've never heard of it, and also if you have, it may occur to you that Grand Rapids (GR), in uh, Michigan somewhere, is not exactly a major venue. I imagine that it was selected for the 2003 tour to draw visitors in an area with proven reserves of interest -- a Dead Sea scrolls exhibit at Chicago in 2000 attracted 300,000 visitors. Original plans for 2003 had the exhibit traveling to Salt Lake City and Houston, but the other cities found the security arrangements too expensive (2003 came after 2001, you know) and pulled out, so GR became the only stop. I invited a girl I like to go on a date there, and we're going tomorrow. I understand that normal people take their dates to movies and dinner after. Well, I may be a freak, but I'm not alone. Afterwards she'll attend a town planning council meeting. (Is this romantic? You bet! See the ISO 9000 Certification entry.) I also mentioned GR at the 86 entry.

I, well, I just came back around to pass a feather duster over the entry. I stopped seeing the girl after that Grand Rapids date. Okay, honestly? The girl stopped seeing me. Or returning my calls and emails. I didn't even see the break-up coming! Was it that I didn't bring flowers? Was it the velcro sneakers? Why won't you tell me!?

I'm so depressed. But no hay mal que por bien no venga. (Spanish for `every cloud has a silver lining.') As I was driving out of the Grand Rapids museum parking lot, undistracted by small talk, by mindless chatter, I discovered that the Gerald R. Ford Museum and Presidential Library is visible across the street. So now I can tell people that I saw the Gerald Ford Museum.

What kind of a crazy name is ``Frodo''???? That's too much to swallow. Nobody could believe something like that!

Equals 1/0.860333589019379762483893424137662

Less recent thoughts about the number 12 (in, like, Babylonian, Greek, and Jewish, Christian and Muslim traditions) can be found in Annemarie Schimmel: The Mystery of Numbers (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994) pp. 192 - 202. [Originally published in German as Das Mysterium der Zahl (Munich: Eugene Diederichs Verlag, 1984).] (Cite furnished by Antreas P. Hatzipolakis.)

Herodotus II.4:

    But as regarding human affairs, this was the account in which they all agreed: the Egyptians, they said, were the first men who reckoned by years and made the year to consist of twelve divisions of the seasons. They discovered this from the stars (so they said). ----- Further, the Egyptians first used the appellations of twelve gods which the Greeks afterwards borrowed from them.

(Thanks to Bob Bazemore for this posting to the Classics list.)

Off the top of his head [and possibly with some help from Matz: Ancient World Lists and Numbers (McFarland, 1995)], Dr. R. Laval Hunsucker mentioned the following even dozens from classical antiquity

  12 Titans
  12 Herculean labors
  12 cities of the Ionian League
  12   "     "  "  Achaean  "    (originally)
  12 tribes of the Delphic Amphictyonic Council
  12 vultures of Romulus
  12 Tables
  12 Fratres Arvales
  12 lictors
  12 scripta
  12 racing chariots (Circ. Max.)
  12 books of the Aeneid
  12   "    " Martial
  12   "    " Quintilian
  12   "    " Colum. De re rust.
  12 Caesars of Suet.

The technical term for fear of thirteen is triskaidekaphobia. The technical term for fear of Friday the thirteenth is paraskevatriskaidekaphobia, q.v. Both terms are constructed in Ancient Greek (the second term is paraskevidekatriaphobia in Modern Greek) but the superstition that Friday the thirteenth is ill-favored is foreign to Greece. On the other hand, there is a superstition that Tuesday the 29th is ill-omened, ever since Constantinople fell to the Turks on that day in May 1453.

One obvious reason why the number 13 would be considered unlucky in general does go back to, or through, the Greeks. The Pythagoreans distinguished deficient, abundant, and perfect numbers depending on whether the sum of their distinct factors is less than, more than, or equal to the number itself. (In order to make this definition nontrivial, the number itself is excluded from the sum. the factor of one, however, is counted.) (Even before the precise definitions were set, however, some inchoate notion of abundant numbers must have existed, and perhaps motivated the adoption of base-12 and -60 systems of measurement units and number representation.)

Prime numbers are maximally deficient, of course, in the sense that the sum of their factors, as defined, is 1. The number 13 is unusual in the circumstance of being a most deficient number following a very abundant number (that would be 12). Great deficiency following great abundance sounds like bad luck indeed.

A more accurate estimate (of the square root of two) is 1.4142135623730950488016887242097 .

Anyway, all that stuff is history. Many of the star coaches and pharmacologists of the old East German sports machine found a congenial new home in the People's Republic of China (PRC), which still upholds the values that were contained by the much-lamented Berlin Wall. And there is no question that the sudden great success of PRC women's swimming team has nothing to do with that old East German magic. The proof: East German chemists provided many very sophisticated, hard-to-trace drugs, but the only thing that desultory testing by a reluctant IOC has been able to find in Chinese swimmers has been artificial testosterone. (Hmm. See also the Tootsie entry.)

Janet Evans, a US swimmer who won three golds in 1988, and a silver and gold in 1992, thought after the wall fell that there would be no more organized drug use. Interviewed before the 1996 Olympics (NYT, Thurs. 18 July 1996, p. B9, byline George Vecsey in Atlanta) she said she favors proposals that any nation with four positive tests in swimming in one Games be banned from the next Games.

           -- --
          |\ | /|
          | \|/ |
           -- --
          | /|\ |
          |/ | \|
           -- --

Lily heard the shot at seventeen minutes to one.

In the US, 17-year patents were the rule from March 1861 to June 8, 1995, but they now run on the Japanese model, 20 years from date of application.

Ellen Sue Stern's Yawn! Bedtime Reading for Insomniacs consists of selected soporific texts, many followed by Sleepercize suggestions. The sleepercizes suggested following the ``Airline Ticket Fine Print'' section include the following:

Close your eyes and count every place you've ever flown on an airplane. ... Now, recall every airport you've ever been in. Count each time, even if you've been in the Detroit airport seventeen times.

More instances of 17 are given at this webpage, proving conclusively that the number occurs.

I think this kind of two-way mnemonic -- which enables one to remember both the key and the datum it is key to -- is common. David was writing in response to a posting in which I mentioned that a cantor friend reacted to my phone number ``oh, Brahms's year of birth'' (1833). I've forgotten most of the phone numbers that I've had since then, but not that one, and I also didn't know Brahms's birth year before he mentioned it as a mnemonic.

Of course, the part of the year GW was born in was designated 1731 then, and 1731/32 for many years afterwards, but it's a good mnemonic. (BTW, GW always celebrated his birthday on February 11, its date O.S. I suppose this made sense enough, and was probably common.)

The speed of light is known exactly by definition (see c); in the appropriate units mentioned above, its value is

                  __________________________________________
        186282.397051220870118507913783504334685437047641772

None of this had a great effect on the outcome of the Franco-Prussian war.

Well, since this entry was first written, we've added entries that do mention 1918, so it is no longer the case that you could link to all of the 1918-related entries, if we had any.

Notice that this puts the bank panic in 1933 [George marries Mary Hatch after she gets back from college; she was in Harry's year]. The snow that day is not dramatic license: Frank Capra checked weather reports for the New York City area on the day of the bank crash.

Cf. 411.

For my master's thesis, I packed my sample in dry ice to cool it below its Curie temperature. The sample modulated transmission between a tuned pair of microwave cavities. When I opened the system up, I discovered that instead of measuring the ferromagnetic antiresonance (FMAR) of my sample, I had measured transmission through water ice. I became a theorist.

Evacuate your waveguides if you're going to cool them even a little below 0 °C.

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(Which was rather late for me)
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles' first LP.

-- Philip Larkin, ``Annus Mirabilis''

For more than I propose to write about 1963, see what Derek Brown has to say about it in the Guardian. Brown thinks Larkin was off a bit on the year. I agree, see the SBF Buffalo Bills entry. (Stay with it: we're talkin' sex!)

• The Jackson Five: ``I'll Be There.''
• Diana Ross: ``Ain't No Mountain High Enough''
  (This was her second release and first real hit as a solo artist. It was an updated version of a song originally written by Nicolas Ashford and Valerie Simpson, and recorded by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell. The earlier version does not contain the lyrics ``Remember life holds for you one guarantee / You'll always have me.'' )
• The Brotherhood of Man: ``United We Stand.''

I have a confession to make. When I was in high school (and not watching the Watergate hearings), my classmates used to face off in pi races: competitive rattling-off of the first 100 digits in the decimal expansion of pi. The confession is, I never participated. To this day I can only remember about ten, although the next eight after that look familiar.

Elvis has been reissued in Latin on CD's.

I only recently realized that there's a section of Meijer's general market that's permanently dedicated to velvet portraits and other Elvis necessities.

Update, late July 2002:
An Elvis remix is climbing to the top of the charts around the world. His second coming! In a deep voice, the Hidden One calls for ``a little less conversation and a little more action.'' The end times are upon us! ``Grab your coat.'' Believers -- prepare for rapture! The King has come!

The table below lists glossary entries that mention 1984 in some connection or other. The asterisks indicate content related to...

• Orwell: George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, published in late 1949.
• Election: The US presidential election. (SPOILER: Ronald W. Reagan beat Walter F. Mondale.)
• Olympics: The Summer Olympics held that year in Los Angeles. (Boycotted by the USSR and its clients in retaliation for the US-led boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow, in protest of the Soviet own-goal invasion of Afghanistan.)
• Macintosh: The commercial Apple aired at the Superbowl, announcing the Macintosh roll-out.

Orwell    Election   Olympics  Macintosh   Entry
  _          *          _        _         Alan Keyes
             *                             DLC
  *                                        DoD
  *          *                   *         downtown Holland
	     *                             ECT
	     *                             GI
  *                              *         Joy's Law
  *                                        Minitrue
             *                             SARV
  *                                        TRU
                                 *         USOC

What a mess!

• Akita
• amphorae
• degradation
• DHT

It's been a great success, all according to plan, except that the euro has been on a steady slide against the dollar. Oh yeah, oil prices and a couple of other things are set in US dollars, so the oil-price wedgie of 2000 had a little extra oomph in Europe. Given the current accounts imbalance, and the 25% slide of the euro against the dollar in its first 20 months of existence, it's almost bizarre to see European companies buying up American. Many reasons have been adduced -- low debt of European companies, strong US economy, lack of a single government that will credibly support the value of the euro, etc. Financial markets are notoriously hard to predict, but they are easy to explain, nonfalsifiably, in hindsight.

The real reason for the fall of the euro is obvious, though few are willing to admit it: ``euro'' is a bad name. The error was compounded by the choice of EUR as its three-letter code. The only thing that prevented it from sinking even faster was the contemporaneous US introduction of supposedly harder-to-counterfeit paper money that is profoundly ugly.

On September 28, 2000, Danes voted 53.1% to 46.9% against adoption of the euro. Britain and Sweden remain out, Greece (which initially failed to meet the convergence criteria) joined on January 1, 2001. The Danish Krone continues to be pegged to the euro. It used to be pegged to the Deutschmark, and for a while it still was indirectly, since the Deutschmark was fixed against the euro (1 EUR = 1.95583 DEM).

An interesting thing about the euro is that it has a ratchet (or is that ``racket''?) mechanism, like the Eagles' ``Hotel California'' --

I tried to find a passage back to the place I was before.
...
but you can never leave...

Cf. ECU.

In 2002, the Vatican reassessed its real estate. St. Peter's Basilica and the other properties had been on the books at a nominal value of one lira. A value is needed in order to compute a total value of Vatican assets for the annual budget report (Consolidated Financial Statement). The nominal value skyrocketed -- to one euro (a 193,527% increase). They don't explain why they use such a small nominal value, but the reasons are obvious.

There are two main reasons:
1. If the Italian government should ever insist they pay property taxes, they'd be paying on a rather low assessed base. Of course, before that could happen, Italy would have to annex the territory, in violation of the Donatio of Constantine and later international agreements. In fact, this already happened once in the past. The international community was outraged, of course, especially other countries that are small like Vatican City is. Fiji, a number of Caribbean nations that had earlier rescued Grenada, and Eritrea all spontaneously coalesced to form what came to be known as a ``coalition of the grudgingly eager.'' They were also able to persuade the US to provide some assistance (logistics, C4I, and half a million heavily armed advisors). The campaign (Operation Holy Smoke) began with an attack by missiles described as ``scary smart.'' As a Pentagon spokesman explained, the goal was to create ``shock and epiphany.'' The elite and once-imposing Swiss Guard was destroyed in the first 6 seconds of the war, leaving behind nothing but colorful scraps of cloth and a couple of brass spearpoints. Very soon, it was ``Mission Accomplished,'' and nothing left to do but the passivation. Uh-ohhh... I think I may have this war confused with another one. The liberation of the Vatican already happened in the future, not in the past.
2. Another reason for the low valuations is the need to shield assets in case of a ruinous suit. So far, it's been dioceses that have been flirting with bankruptcy, but you never know. The Catholic Church has operations in over 200 countries. Any one of those countries -- the US, say -- might have surprising attitudes about liability and an expansive notion of sovereignty. Or what if the International Court of Justice decides that the Vatican owes Crusaders' descendants unpaid veterans benefits with as much as 900 years' accumulated interest? To say nothing of liability for all that collateral damage, with triple indemnity under RICO, etc. The Church needs to protect its assets and subito, so it doesn't, um, go under the way the Hara Krishni did. Sorry -- I meant Hare Krishna. What the Church has to do is form an asset management company -- based in Delaware, say. (I'm sure the Cayman Islands offer competitive alternatives, if US taxes become an issue.)
   A small group of trusted cardinals could buy up all the assets for, say, 300 bucks, and incorporate as VatHoldings, Inc. or something. You can incorporate in Delaware with as few as three company officers, and nobody even has to show up in the state. New incorporation options like LLC and LLLP offer increased liability protection, and Delaware is very aggressive about maintaining jurisdiction under its own separate business-court system. (Sure, cash assets can't be directly underassessed, but VatHoldings would have to purchase the debts as well. They have to take a charge for the care of all those aging brothers and sisters, you know. Cf. TUPE. The Vatican might happily pay to have a management company take personnel off its hands.)

Among the spelling errors for number homonyms, the most common one that I have observed is the writing of to when too is meant.

1. Second Base[man].
2. Hit for a double.

In Spanish, one of the names of coins of this denomination was dolar, after the Dutch daler, which translated German Thaler. That was short for Joachimsthaler, locative form of Joachimsthal, or `Joachim Valley,' the name of a valley in Bohemia, and subsequently a town in that valley, where a similar coin was first minted. (See Groschen.) That town was destroyed near the end of the 30 Years' War, I think. Rebuilt or not, it is now Jáchymov (in the Czech Republic), a center of uranium mining. There's also a town called Joachimsthal about 30 miles northeast of Berlin. That was named after a man named Joachim. (Incidentally, the German word Thal, now written Tal, is cognate with the English dale.)

The term milled generally means machined or worked in some way -- passed through a mill. (A mill was originally only a grinder for grain. The name was applied to a succession of larger and more sophisticated grinders; as the first piece of fixed, heavy machinery that typically ran on something other than human muscle power, it gave its name to other machines.) Milling has a couple of specialized senses in the case of money. A milled coin has a raised edge, possibly with radial grooves, and milling refers both to the making of the raised edge and to the marking of that raised edge.

In ``milled dollar'' it's hard to hear the final consonant in the first word distinctly from the initial consonant of the second. Hence, ``Spanish Mill Dollar'' is now a more common spelling. A similar thing has happened with the cold treat originally called ``iced cream.'' Not very different is the evolution of ``you've got another think coming'' into ``you've got another thing coming,'' helped along by Judas Priest's ``You've Got Another Thing Coming.'' (Some possible insight into ng vs. nk at this ng entry.)

By controlling Mexico and South America, Imperial Spain had access to the richest supplies of gold of the day. It was literally Spain's golden age. Wasted riches, like the oil wealth of today's Venezuela and Brunei. In those days, private banks in the US would issue notes whose value was guaranteed by the bank's promise to redeem the paper for real money -- specie. The coin of choice in the US was the dollar coin into which Spain minted its gold. Here are some convenient examples, where the ``milled'' spelling can be read clearly.

It was very tempting for banks to issue more paper money than they had specie to back. Indeed, it was more than tempting. A bank makes its money by lending on interest. If you lend money in paper that isn't backed by specie, you increase the money supply and economic activity, and your interest income. So long as you don't issue too many bad loans, and so long as not too many people redeem their bank notes all at once, you can have a lot more money in circulation than you have specie in reserve, and make a bigger profit. The trouble is, your bank notes aren't really backed by specie, they're backed by your debtors' promises to repay. Every so often, people handling the notes of some bank start thinking that there seem to be a lot of the notes around, and begin to wonder if the bank is ``diluting'' the value. Soon there's a run on the bank as people hurriedly redeem their paper before the coin that supposedly backs it runs out. This would cause little economic crashes on a regular basis. I think the last big one of this sort was in 1893.

Eventually, though unsteadily, the US government put private banks out of the business of printing money (though some US banks do print money circulated by some other countries). (For a bit on the parallel process in France, see the BULLION entry.) Federalizing bank notes didn't really solve the problem, though. The whole situation was repeated with specie replaced by government paper and coin, and with bank notes replaced by bank accounts. A run on a bank then simply meant that lots of people suddenly wanted to liquidate their accounts. As George Bailey, played by Jimmy Stewart, explained to panicked customers in ``It's A Wonderful Life,'' the Building & Loan couldn't redeem accounts because the accountholders' money was at work on loan. In the Great Depression, that situation depicted in the movie played out less successfully in the real life of many towns. That's why the FDIC was created. The FDIC does require banks to have some money on reserve, but basically they avoid runs by credibly promising to make accounts (up to $100,000) good. Fundamentally, it works because people believe it will work. After the depression, a few states, like Ohio and Maryland, did not require banks they chartered to be federally insured. (I think both of these had state insurance systems.) Thing were cool all the way through to the 1980's when they experienced bank runs and quickly changed their laws.

The US government -- enh, the Federal Reserve -- does not promise to redeem your money with gold. Instead, the notes are backed, ultimately, ``by the full faith and credit of the US government.'' I think this means that they'll redeem your worn-out dollars for crisp new ones. Sounds kinda wishy-washy, but it seems to work. To be fair, it's a little more magical than that. A dollar is worth a dollar because Congress says it is legal tender: if a debt is denominated in dollars, then federal reserve bank notes have to be accepted in payment of it. It's really beautiful when you think of -- an entire economy held together by an abstract set of mutual obligations to honor a money concept only symbolically and rather incompletely backed by anything of ``value.'' Of course, the value of the dollar in terms of anything other than dollars is variable.

The Spanish Milled Dollar is not currently tracked at this currency conversion resource. (Notice how Andorra uses both French and Spanish money -- especially now that it's the same money.)

If you already understand about dimensions, please avert your eyes. The following is for those who bailed out of the math courses before college, and are mystified by the frequent application of terms like ``two-dimensional'' to a variety of radically different things, like the water's surface or a soap bubble, or personalities, or the elastic properties of isotropic, homogeneous materials.

Briefly, two-dimensional things are things described with two independent numbers.

Dimensionality is a crude first indication of how a phenomenon or object will be described quantitatively. A two-dimensional object is an object which, for the purposes of a particular description, needs two independently varying numbers. For example, no wait, I have to catch my breath.

Alright, let's consider some examples. A large class of simple examples is flat things.

Alternative theories include various versions of the 3ST and the FgH (follow the 3ST link).

The 2SH was developed in the nineteenth century by Protestant Biblical scholars in Germany such as H.J. Holtzmann and Christian Hermann Weisse (1801-1866). In German the hypothesis is called the Zweiquellentheorie.

Hey! 2X costs a dollar more! Discrimination! Sizism! (Prejudice against people of size.)

North American wood-frame houses typically have walls with vertical two-by-four studs spaced 16 inches apart. No matter what the insulating material is, it's a good guess there's a little under four inches of it, not counting the sheetrock.

Here's the usual logorrheic description from IBM.

My mind is boggling up pretty badly: I just noticed that there's yet another non-joke site that is offering to solve businesses' looming problems with the year 2000. I tremble to think what AltaVista might reveal. It's called by various names, including ``millennium dating problem'' and ``Y2K"

Obviously, it was our intention that using the number "2000" in connection with body parts would help to reinforce our product name and the fact that Lever 2000 is milder to the skin than any other antibacterial or deodorant soap on the market.

Best guess at how you could come up with 2000 if you tried seems to be to count well over a thousand of the hairs. If you want a more manageable number, try Procter and Gamble for 200.

There's been some tinkering with the scoring algorithm (see SAT entry for an example) but here's a clue to why one might choose an algorithm with a nonzero minimum: If the score on a multiple-choice question is x for the right answer and 0 for any wrong answer (sometimes these terms should be in quotes), then simple guessing will lead to a higher score, on average, than leaving the answer sheet blank. A better scheme, for questions with n possible answers, awards n for a right answer, scores 1 for a blank, and 0 for a wrong answer. The average score obtained by guessing randomly is 1 (a score of n, a fraction 1/n of the time), the same as for leaving the question blank. (The SAT's use this kind of scoring rule.) The range of scores on 200 questions with n = 4 possible answers is 0 to 800, but anyone turning in a completely blank answer sheet gets a 200, as does the average person who guesses randomly on those questions answered. (Granted, this is an `average' person only in a somewhat restricted statistical sense.)

The standard deviation around this 200, for a person guessing randomly on all questions, is about 24.5 . However, if you can rule out some of the right answers, you can improve your chances of getting a perfect zero.

1. Today is the first day of the rest of your life.
2. One day you will die.
3. Therefore, you could die tomorrow.

In view of the increased danger, I decided to maintain a real-time 2003 entry, like a diary or embedded blog. Of course, I only increment the entry if something noteworthy happens.

• October 16
  Well, it's been a pretty quiet year so far. Bob Hope died this summer at the age of 100, but that was not surprising. Also, the good people of California held a recall election and put an action figure in the governor's mansion. There was a brief military thing this Spring, and somehow we ended up as the occupying power in a Middle-Eastern country of 25 million people, there forever or until the Iraqis become the first Arab country to get the hang of liberal democratic self-government, whichever comes first. Kind of a bummer. And there was a bit of excitement on the medical front too. It seems so long ago, but it only first made the news in February. It was an epidemic of SARS, a new, extremely contagious disease against which we have no effective medicines. About 10% fatal, with many of the survivors crippled. In April, the case count was doubling about weekly. If that had continued, by now about half a billion people would have died, but severe quarantines brought it under control. It's expected back next year.
  So anyway, something finally happened! It turns out that this will be remembered as the year that the great baseball curses reasserted themselves.

IS THIS BETTER?

There's more about Wylie at the entry for his Generation of Vipers. More information about Catch-22 can be found a few paragraphs into the TV entry.

Absolute temperature is fundamentally defined as the inverse of the partial derivative of entropy with respect to energy:

                   1   ∂S
                   - = --
                   T   ∂U
									

Late in the nineteenth century, statistical mechanicians like J. Willard Gibbs and Ludwig Boltzmann recognized that entropy was proportional to the logarithm of the number of accessible states. Within classical mechanics, however, ``states'' form a continuum and one ``counts'' phase-space volume instead. [I am stating this in a somewhat anachronistic and ahistorical way that reflects current understanding.] If one assumes a uniform density of states per unit volume of phase space, then one can compare ratios of volumes. This allows one to compute the entropy of an ideal (monatomic) gas ab initio from a realistic classical mechanical model (small elastic massive particles), although only up to an arbitrary offset. The arbitrary offset corresponds to the unknown density of states per unit volume of phase space.

At this point, one could begin to see that the natural unit for entropy was simply units: the natural definition of entropy was just the dimensionless logarithm of a state count. In this view, temperature has natural units of energy. Given the uncertain status and limited success of statistical mechanics before the advent of quantum mechanics, and given the entrenched status of various temperature scales and corresponding derived entropy units in extensive chemical measurements, this perspective had no effect on practical measurement practice.

Quantum theory and then quantum mechanics brought discrete states into statistical mechanics, and thus eliminated the offset ambiguity in entropy: the correspondence principle is essentially that the density of quantum states in phase space is h^-D, where h is Planck's constant and D is the number of independent coordinates. This principle applies in the classical or semi-classical regime of large quantum numbers, and explains the success of classical statistical mechanics at high temperature and of Wien's black-body spectrum at short wavelengths. Quantum statistical mechanics also dramatically expanded the applicability of statistical mechanics, so that today it is believed to apply to all equilibrium systems. [To be fastidiously honest, one must admit that as a practical matter most nuclear and condensed-matter systems are computationally intractable without some semi-empirical approximations that partly invalidate the computations as tests of the principles of statistical mechanics. To be fair, the fundamental consequences and beautiful theoretical clarity of statistical mechanics, as well as the computational successes it does have, are what make it a fundamentally trusted computational framework.]

This approach to the units of entropy was in fact the best possible within classical physics, because all states must be discrete states for entropy to be finite. Thus, some kind of quantum theory or quantum mechanics is necessary to compute entropy from first principles. (For an unbounded system, a continuum of states can occur in quantum mechanics, and does yield an infinite entropy at nonzero temperature. However, there is no inconsistency since an infinite system can have an infinite magnitudes of extrinsic quantites like entropy. The orthonormality and completeness relations for the continuum of quantum states indicates how they contribute to the thermodynamic potentials, and finite intrinsic quantities like specific entropy and chemical potential are finite.)

You can use the difference between 273.15 and 273.16 to learn about ice skating: Let's say that the triple-point pressure is much lower than atmospheric. Then the slope of the liquid-solid equilibrium line on the p-T plot averages to

                      1 atm - ~0 atm
                   -------------------  = -100 atm/K .
                   273.15 K - 273.16 K

For modern mythological uses of threes, see the PNAC entry.

1. Third Base[man].
2. Hit for a triple.

Also refers to high-level langugages (HLL's) for programming (Algol, APL, BASIC, C/C++, COBOL, FORTRAN, LISP, PASCAL, PROLOG, etc.). To this way of thinking, machine and assembly languages would be 1GL and 2GL, respectively. Languages within an application (like a database or spreadsheet) are 4GL's.

By the 1990's, as 3i, it was Europe's largest investor in unquoted companies, with a strong bias toward manufacturing.

According to polling data reported by columnist Ellen Goodman, in the 2004 US presidential election ``62 percent of unmarried women voters picked Kerry [the Democratic candidate] and 55 percent of married women voters chose Bush [the Republican].''

It is easy to explain the great similarity in the non-Markan material in GLuke and GMatt by assuming that one author read the other's work. A major reason for positing Q at all (in the usual context of the two-source hypothesis -- 2SH, q.v.) is to explain those similarities in a way that allows for the inconsistencies that also occur. The weird thing about the 3ST is that cribbing eliminates the necessity for Q, and Q in the presence of cribbing does nothing to explain away the inconsistencies. You can get around the latter problem by supposing that Luke got a look only at, say, early versions of GMatt and of Q (called sQ), or that the inconsistencies were introduced by later redaction, but then you're still left wondering why Q should be introduced at all. (Not that its existence is contradicted, but it is unmotivated.) Why not go with something like the Farrer-Goulder hypothesis (FH), which is essentially the 3ST minus Q (and Matthew before Luke). In summary, the 3ST is a bad idea.

Cf., FH.

Antreas P. Hatzipolakis has compiled PiPhilology, a collection of π mnemonics (for the first digits of π) and π-related poems in several languages. Most π mnemonics represent each digit by a word with a number of letters equal to the value of the digit. (E.g., ``How I wish I could calculate pie'' -- or π, depending on whether you want rounding or truncation.) It is therefore convenient that the first zero does not come until the thirty-second decimal place. [Ten-letter words are used to represent zero.] It appears that no recent version is on the web (it had reached version 9 by 1999), but this site has ``Short Text version 2.0 (March 7, 96),'' and that's enough for my purposes.

Peter Alfeld serves the first 10,000 digits.

The Eisenhower silver dollar is 38.1 mm in diameter. See how silly and inconvenient metric units are?

Eight is lucky -- ``wealth.'' Cf. NESIS.

Japanese uses a mix of native Japanese and Chinese number words. The two common words for 4 are shi (which also means `death') and the native yon. Because of the inauspicious second sense of shi, four men must be described as yonin.

``I pledge
My Head to clearer thinking,
My Heart to greater loyalty,
My Hands to larger service, and
My Health to better living.
For my club, my community, my country and my world.''

Awwww. Founded in 1902. ``4-H is the youth education branch of the Cooperative Extension Service, a program of the United States Department of Agriculture. Each state and each county has access to a County Extension office for both youth and adult programs.'' Really ``each''? Does that mean ``every''? Even Manhattan County?

Zuckerman and Bowen are famous sociologists. Zuckerman, professor emerita Columbia University, has had a