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.bg
(Domain name code for) Bulgaria. Ariadne, ``The European and Mediterranean link resource for Research, Science and Culture,'' has information.

Rec.Travel offers some links.

I met a guy called Nico who claims he's from northern Greece. ``Salonika?'' ``Further north than that.'' I forgot to ask if he wasn't really from Bulgaria.

Netwizards, based in Miami, Florida, spammed me with an email return address in the .bg TLD (ccTLD), but the remove link is to a mailbox in the .jp TLD. They've got me surrounded.

BG
BackGround.

BG
Bad Guy.

BG
Bellum Gallicum or De Bello Gallico. Latin titles that might be styled `The Gallic War' or `On the Gallic War,' resp., in modern usage. Both are used as title for a self-promoting book by Julius Caesar. Indeed, both are used in this glossary (see the gringo entry and Warrington).

It's probably worth pointing out that in ancient times, books often did not have formal titles. (But they might; see sittybus, mentioned at the sillybus entry.) The books of the Old Testament instance some common ways in which books came to be named. The books of the pentateuch were called (and are called, in Hebrew) by the first word of their texts. Hence the first book is ``Bereshit'' (pronounced like English ``beret sheet''), Hebrew for `in the beginning,' which is the first word of the book. [A brief interlude:

The White Rabbit put on his spectacles. "Where shall I begin, please your Majesty?" he asked.

``Begin at the beginning,'' the King said gravely, ``and go on till you come to the end: then stop.''

End of brief interlude.]

The Greek translators called it Genesis, `origin, creation,' which is a summary of the subject matter rather than the best translation of bereshit. (The first words of the Septuagint are En archê.) The title Genesis was preserved in Latin and most European languages. (It may be that the division into five books dates to no earlier than the Septuagint.)

Other O.T. books, particularly those of the prophets, were and are known by their authors' names. One book that is unusual in other ways was written by a self-identified Kohelet. This word's translation is uncertain, and it might be a name or a title. One oddity is that the word is morphologically female but construed male. From the root (i.e., from the three consonants) the word must have something to do with an assembly, though it's not directly clear whether it refers to someone who attends or leads the assembly, and it's not clear what kind of assembly it is. The Septuagint interprets the word as ekklêsiastês, a `member of an assembly' (although the author claims to have ruled in Jerusalem). The Greek word was Latinized straightforwardly to Ecclesiastes. Some modern translations, for example the NRSV, prefer to translate Kohelet as `Teacher.'

Ancient Latin books (i.e. scrolls) don't seem to have been any more likely to have names than do modern memoranda. Another famous Latin work with various forms of title is Satyricon or Satyrica (see the author's entry, Petronius, for more uncertainty).

When I feel up to it, I'll try to explain the status quaestionis of the Suda or Suida, a much later (Byzantine) Greek work whose title, or maybe that's the author's name, is uncertain.

The oldest surviving German book is a translation of a Latin collection of synonyms. (``German'' here means a continental West Germanic predecessor of modern German. This particular book is in something like Alemannic.) The work was probably written sometime between 765 and 775, probably in the monastery school at Fulda. The synonyms are ordered alphabetically, and the book is known as Der Abrogans, after the first word (`gentle, humble').

BG
BlueGrass. I've only seen the abbreviation in entertainment communications, not garden care.

Let me take this opportunity to say that the banjo is DURN LOUD INSTR'MINT!

BG
Maybe you heard ``Bee-Gee.''

BG
Bowling Green (student or team or team member). This sounds dangerously similar to ``Bee-Gee.'' Have they made contingency plans to evacuate in case of concert?

BG
Breakup Girl! A comic-strip superheroine!

BG
Burning Ground.

BGA
Bad Golfers Association. Proclaim it: ``Bad but Proud!'' Buy their stuff, it's bound to be more hip than that of the PGA.

BGA
Ball Grid Array. A surface-mount package. Common subtypes distinguished are CBGA, PBGA and TBGA. Click on this search for images.

BGA
The British Gliding Association. ``Gliding in the UK is not controlled directly by the usual governing body (The Civil Aviation Authority), but by its own administration'' -- the BGA.

BGC
BioGeochemical Cycle.

BGC
BubbleGum Crisis. An anime series.

B&GCA
Boys and Girls Clubs of America. (No apostrophe in name. ``did you know? 29% of Club members are 11-13 years of age.'') The organization traces its origins to 1860, when several female persons in Hartford, Connecticut decided that ``boys who roamed the streets should have a positive alternative.'' Over time this got increasingly organized. You young folks may find this hard to believe, but once upon a time stickball would just spontaneously erupt in empty lots, no preparation necessary. Now, of course, you need a little league with uniforms, coaches, a schedule, an organization chart, a platoon of soccer parents in all-terrain buses -- the whole disaster. In 1956, the Boys Clubs of America received a charter from the US Congress.

In 1990, they apparently decided that girls who roamed the streets should also have a positive alternative, and the more inclusive current name was adopted. Congress granted a new charter.

In 2001, Kelly Jones, Miss Alabama for that year, made B&GCA her platform. Good move -- Denby Dung, Miss Hawaii, was on the flimsy platform of ``The Music Effect.'' Everyone is agreed that music has effects, but ``the'' music effect that has been flogged for a few years is the Mozart Effect, at best a statistical fluke in a small experiment, completely discredited by further research, an urban legend with a known author. Too bad. Unlike most of the others, she was kinda cute. Oh, here's a ditzy doozy: Meranda Hafford, Miss Maine; platform: D.A.R.E. Miss New Mexico, from Roswell, was ``promoting US Citizenship.'' (Roswell is known for aliens.) I guess she was taking a cross-that-bridge-when-I-get-there approach to the Miss World competition. (Miss Washington was promoting aging in America. Ideological turf battle alert.) A couple of contestants were promoting good decision making. They needed to take their own advice. Did you know that there's a town in Ohio called Dublin? This stuff is as treacly as a presidential address. Remember President Ford's WIN? Miss Virginia's platform was B.A.S.E.

Miss Kentucky ran on the NYN platform, but America wasn't ready by 2001 for a Miss America named Monica. Emily Foster, Miss Georgia 2001, had a platform of Character Education. That only suggests character actors. I guess it passes muster, but not using a standard name like Emily -- that cost her.

Whenever I work on an entry like this, a little voice in my head screams ``INSIPID!! You have to point out that it's insipid!!!!!'' And I tell the little voice -- ``no, that's too obvious.''

BGD
Billion Gallons per Day. The traditional unit gallon is a give-away that we're talking American billions -- thousand millions. For something a bit more informative, see the gallons-per-day entry gpd.

BGH
Bovine Growth Hormone. The controversy is at rBGH.

BGH
Buffalo General Hospital. Teaching hospital affiliated with the University at Buffalo (UB).

BGHT
Bromocriptine Growth Hormone (GH) Test. Measures rise in GH following oral administration of bromocriptine. Since bromocriptine acts on D2 receptors in competition with the schizophrenia drug haloperidol, haloperidol dosing reduces the GH rise, and the disappearance of GH rise can be interpreted as saturation of the D2 receptors by haloperidol.

BGI
Blue and Gold Illustrated. For news about Notre Dame football and also basketball.

BGK
Bhatnager, Gross and Krook (equation). A simplified version of the Boltzmann equation (BE) in which the collision integral is replaced by a relaxation-time approximation. Introduced in the same year by these authors [in Phys. Rev., 94, 511 (1954) and by Walender (vide BGK-W)].

This equation is much closer to the equation that semiconductor transport researchers usually call the ``Boltzmann equation.''

BGK-W
Another name for BGK equation, introduced by P. Walender in Arkiv. Fysik., 7, 507 (1954).

BGL
Boost Graph Library.

BGN
(US) Board on Geographic Names.

Ironically for an entity whose business is to standardize names, the BGN -- or its authority -- has had its name changed a number of times. It was originally founded with the name it has currently, but from 1906 to 1934 it was officially the US Geographic Board. In 1934 it was abolished and its functions were transferred to the Department of the Interior, which assigned those to a newly established Division of Geographic Names and an Advisory Committee on Geographic Names to perform those functions. (The board had accumulated technical responsibilities over time. I suspect that the move to the DoI in many cases meant hanging a new DoI shingle on the old offices rather than dispersing the talent and hiring newbies, although I've seen that approach too.) At the end of 1935 the DoI consolidated the Division and the Committee to form a new U.S. Board on Geographic Names.

All the preceding changes were made by executive order or DoI order. In 1947, the BGN was reorganized by an act of Congress. For more detail, see this page in the National Archives.

An example of the BGN's early arrogance can be found at the Pgh entry. Nowadays the BGN claims to cooperate with local authorities, and to some extent I'm sure it does.

BGN
BackGround Noise.

BGND
BackGrouND.

BGO
Bi4Ge3O12.

BGP
Border Gateway Protocol.

BGR
BandGap Reduction.

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B-Greek
Biblical Greek Mailing List. ``B-Greek is a mailing list for discussing the Greek text and language of the Bible. Anyone interested in New Testament Studies is invited to subscribe, but the list assumes a working knowledge of Biblical Greek.

B-Greek was started by David Marotta at the Center for Christian Study, an independent Christian ministry at the University of Virginia. In 1998, David asked to step down as list owner. We are grateful to David for his vision of a forum where the Greek text and language of the Bible are discussed in detail by an eclectic group of beginning students and veteran teachers, laymen and clergy, conservatives and liberals, earnest inquirers and academic scholars -- all equally committed to probing the Biblical text in the original Koine, and jointly exploring the mysteries and probabilities of Biblical Greek morphology and syntax. If you are interested in what the New Testament or Septuagint says in the original Greek, and if you can appreciate and learn from people who aren't just like you, then B-Greek is the place to be!''

BGS
British Geriatric Society.

BGS
Business Group Services.

BGSU
Bowling Green State University.

BGU
Ben Gurion University of the Negev. David Ben Gurion was a founder and the first president of Israel. (Albert Einstein was offered the job of president first, but everybody was relieved that he turned it down.)

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BGU
Berlin Griechische Urkunden. Full title: Ägyptische Urkunden aus den königlichen Museen zu Berlin herausgegeben von der Generalverwaltung: Griechische Urkunden. `Egyptian documents [on papyrus] from the royal museums at Berlin, published by the general administration: Greek [language] documents.' Cf. BKT.

BGU is the longest-running serial dedicated exclusively to papyrology. The first fascicle of its first volume appeared in 1892. Cf. MPER.

BGU
Burning Ground (BG) Upgrade.

BGY
Billion Gallons per Year. American billions. Not as much as you'd think; see the gallons-per-day entry gpd.

.bh
(Domain name code for) Bahrain. Bahrain is pronounced bah-Khreyn in English. Khreyn is a transliteration of the Russian for `horseradish.' I expect that you will find all of this enlightenment quite -- what? -- useful?

Furthermore, the very oldest CP members, the prunes who joined before 1905 or thereabouts, were sometimes known in the old Soviet Union as ``old horseradish.'' This was not necessarily affectionate. Time was, veterans who had fought in the Great Patriotic War (WWII) could cut ahead in the queue. That was no minor privilege, as the state distribution center would run out of anything good before the queue ran out.

BH
``Beverly Hills 90210.'' A soap opera. Modern Art, TV and psychopathology all have self-absorption in common.

BH
Black Hole.

Bh
Bohrium. Atomic number 107.

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

BH
Buried Heterostructure.

BHA
Bibliography of the History of Art.

BHA
British Humanist Association. People who aren't planning to go to heaven.

BHA
Butylated HydroxyAnisole. A food preservative. Like BHT, an antioxidant in fats and dry cereals.
                  C(CH )
                 /    ³ ³
           _____/
          / ___ \
H CO_____/ /   \ \_____OH
 ³       \ \___/ /
          \_____/

Many studies indicate that it's safe. I know of one study (a 1982 Japanese study of cancer in rats) that indicates otherwise; perhaps that's to be expected on statistical grounds. I say, if it doesn't taste good enough to glop onto junk food, it's probably safer than granola.

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BHAch
Bulletin d'histoire achéménide. A journal of the history of the Near East and Central Asia under the Achaemenids, Persian kings from the middle of the sixth c. BCE to 330 BCE.

BHAch does not appear on an especially regular schedule. Volume I appeared during 1997. BHAch II, covering the period autumn 1997 to autumn 2000, appeared in Spring 2001. It's an analytic bibliography.

b.h./b.e.
Blond hair, blue eyes, or black hair, brown eyes. Or maybe something else. Personals abbreviation meaning `not a deep thinker.'

BHC
Bridgeport Hydraulic Company.

BHD
Bootstrap Hybrid Decoding. A kind of serial decoding, introduced in 1971 by J..., I forget.

BHF
Buffered HydroFluoric (HF) acid. Useful in silicon-based (which is most of) microelectronics manufacture; see BOE.

BHL
Bernard-Henri Lévy. (Note regarding the name: There's an obscure French law that says if there's a ``Lévy'' anywhere in your name, then there must also be a hyphen, and at least one y must be converted to an i. This raises mildly interesting logical dilemmas if the only y in your name is in Lévy itself. See how this can cause international problems at the OWI entry.)

BHL is a stylish variant on the standard-issue public-intellectual idiot that France produces in abundance and American academics celebrate. His prose is pleasant, if you can stomach the stupidity.

Look, that's all you need to know now. I'll write up the reasons when I can find the time.

Actually, BHL is usually described as a philosopher, journalist, and foo, where foo varies but has included film-maker. If he were also a businessman, he'd be France's Hugh Hefner.

BHM
Black History Month. February... in the US. So really it's not a month so much as a sequence of spacetime regions. But BHSTRs doesn't have the same ring.

BHMC
Body and Hoist Manufacturers Division. ``Operating under the NTEA umbrella since 1978.''

BHN
Bayerisches Hochschulnetz. Bavarian Higher-education Net.

BHN
Brinell Hardness Number. The BHN is a measure of the hardness of a material. You might then ask: what precisely is the hardness of a material? The answer is, it's the sort of property that's described by the BHN, not inconsistent with the conventional but imprecise notion of hardness. It's like intelligence: a property that can be quantified in various generally consistent ways, but too complicated as a general phenomenon to admit of a single fundamental definition. Figure it out!

The Brinell hardness number summarizes the result of the Brinell hardness test, in which a hard ball is pressed into a flat surface of the material under test.

BHP
Biological Hazard Potential.

BHP, B.H.P.
Brake HorsePower. ``Brake'' refers to the fact that this is measured by a brake (see prony). In fact, the power that can be braked is the output power that is of interest: it is the part of the power generated by an engine that is available for work (and eventually for braking): the power left over after that consumed internally for keeping the engine moving, and for keeping the engine warm against heat losses to the cooling system. ``Horsepower'' is power measured in units of horsepower (HP). For more on braking, consider the philosophical reflections at the motor vehicle entry.

Informally, the unit horsepower is often called ``horses.'' For irrelevant thoughts on horses, see the hoofbeats entry.

BH-QC
Buried-Heterostructure Quantum-Cascade (laser).

BHS
British Horse Society.

BHT
Butylated HydroxyToluol. Specifically: 2,6-di-t-butyl-p-cresol. Another food preservative. Like BHA, an antioxidant in fats and dry cereals.
                 C(CH )
                /    ³ ³
          _____/
         / ___ \
H C_____/ /   \ \_____OH
 ³      \ \___/ /
         \_____/
               \
                \
                 C(CH )
                     ³ ³

BHTC
Book House Training Centre. Officially the Publishing Training Centre (PTC) at Book House.

bhut
You can never have enough words that begin in bh, I always say, especially ones that are accepted by all three major Scrabble dictionaries. BTW, it means `a small whirlwind.'

.bi
(Domain name code for) Burundi. South of Rwanda; similar ethnic mess.

Bi
Bismuth. Atomic number 83.

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

BI
Bank Indonesia. Indonesian name of the Bank of Indonesia.

BI
Business Information. As in ``BI systems'' -- information technology (IT) applied to business.

BIA
Biospecific Interaction Analysis.

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BIA
Bulletin d'Information archéologique. A publication of IFAO.

BIA
(US) Bureau of Indian Affairs.

bian
An alternative form (generally pronounced but not written) of the Spanish word bien. In its standard form, the word is an adverb meaning `well' and, in very slightly technical usage, a noun meaning `good.' The pronunciation of the adverb with a is a facetious affectation, intended to suggest ostentatiously Frenchified speech. (The French cognate of bien, spelled identically, sounds like bian in Spanish pronunciation, though the n is realized as a nasalization of the /a/ rather than being articulated as in English and Spanish.

biannual
Twice a year. Same as semiannual. If you mean once every two years, use biennial.

bias
In electronics, bias is the voltage or the sign of the voltage between two terminals of a device. That's a lot less verbose than what I originally wrote, which was this:
In electronics, bias is almost synonymous with voltage or sign of voltage. Voltage, like any potential, is ``arbitrary up to a constant'': only differences in voltage are physically significant within the domain of electronics. In particular, this means that any ``positive voltage'' might be negative in a different, equally accurate description. Of course, in analyzing an electronic circuit or any electromagnetical system, one does select a convenient zero of voltage. (This is no different than selecting a convenient origin for a coordinate system, even though the ``origin'' is arbitrary.) The zero is usually the voltage of a node in the circuit, and that node is called ground (US) or earth (UK).

Thus, in any particular context, ``positive voltage'' is meaningful; it means that the voltage is positive relative to whatever has been chosen as the zero of voltage. That is a statement about voltage differences. This is utterly obvious to anyone who knows anything about electronics, but the explanation would be helpful to a philosopher.

While positive and negative voltage have clear enough meaning for a circuit generally, there are many circumstances where one wants to distinguish positive and negative voltage differences between different terminals of a particular device within the circuit. In this context, one uses the word bias instead of voltage. In other words, voltage is implicitly the voltage relative to ground for the circuit or system; bias is the voltage of one terminal or node of a device relative to another. The term bias voltage is perhaps the more common term for bias when one is referring to the magnitude rather than the sign.

For two-terminal devices with symmetric CV or I-V characteristics, the bias is the voltage or the sign of the voltage between the two terminals, and which bias is positive must obviously be defined in terms of the circuit. Nonlinear two-terminal devices (usually with asymmetric IV characteristics) are called diodes. Most diodes are designed, or at least can function, as rectifiers; they have low impedance with one sign of bias and high impedance with not-too-large bias voltages of the opposite sign (Zener diode again have low impedance at larger negative voltage). For these (i.e., most) diodes, positive bias (more often ``forward bias'') is bias of the sign that turns the device on at low bias. For any diode that is essentially a pn junction, forward bias means p positive relative to n. This might be Vpn > 0 or VD > 0, if the diode is not so far beneath notice that it has its own voltage variable named. (But beware: VD is often the name of the ``turn-on'' voltage of a bipolar transistor.) For bipolar devices with three or more terminals, it is useful and common to speak of particular junctions being forward- or reverse-biased. For every bipolar device, any arrow in the schematic diagram represents the forward-biased current direction of the terminal or pn junction represented.

In many contexts, particularly when one is discussing the operation of an isolated device, there is no distinction in sense between bias and voltage, and the terms are used fairly interchangeably. Actually, in my limited experience, ``voltage'' is more used in school explanations (understandably, since one doesn't want to pile on new terminology all at once).

bias voltage
I already explained that and I'm not going to do it again! See bias! Honestly, you people!

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BIAUL
Bulletin of the Institute of Archaeology, University of London.

BIB
Backward Indicator Bit. (SS7 acronym.)

BIB
Bag In Box. Packaging Industry Abbreviation.

BIB, B.I.B.
Banque Internationale du Burkina. Abbreviation with periods, and the nonfluent translation ``Bank International of Burkina,'' are traditional in 419 spam. Don't fall for a lexicographically nonstandard scam!

Bibi
Nickname of politician Benjamin Netanyahu, Likud party leader and Israeli PM from 1996 until defeated for reelection late Spring 1999. (He resigned as party leader after his defeat. He lingered as PM while Labor's Ehud Barak took his time constructing a coalition.) Subsequently he has been a prominent member of a Likud-led government formed by Ariel Sharon. When Sharon bolted to form a new party in 2005 (see below), Bibi became leader of the rump Likud.

Israel has a parliamentary system of government with a unicameral legislature called the Knesset. The membership of the Knesset is fixed at 120 on a traditional basis (that was the size of the knesset gadol, `large' knesset, 2500 years ago; cf. 435). As in Italy and elsewhere that parliament has been split into uncooperative minorities, there was frustration with this system. The idea arose that a stronger executive was the solution, so in the mid-nineties a move was made a small part of the way towards an American-style separation of powers: the PM is now elected in a national poll, separately from the rest of the Knesset. (In the fact of separate election, this somewhat resembles the system of French Fifth Republic. In France, however, the separately elected president holds executive powers independently of parliament, and a prime minister is determined by coalition politics in the parliament. In Israel, the separately elected leader is the PM, and must form a government (a governing coalition in knesset) like any other prime minister. Israel also has a President who is head of state and has only a small, mostly ceremonial role in government.)

After just two elections under the new system (1996, 1999), many Israelis figured they had the worst of both systems (US and parliamentary): by casting a vote for one of the two major-party PM candidates, voters can determine the leader of the next government without voting to give that PM's party a single other seat in Knesset. As a result, there was a decline in the share of seats held by the two major parties (Labor and Likud, which are themselves more like close coalitions of smaller parties). Interestingly, this was thought to have a positive-feedback effect: smaller parties see their interest in the new system, and collectively the smaller parties are now more powerful, making it seem unlikely that the clock would be turned back.

On February 6, 2001, Sharon was elected PM by the largest majority ever. On the day he was sworn in, March 7, Knesset amended the Basic Law (the written constitution) back to something resembling the status quo ante (details in unofficial English translation here). The constitutional change took effect in 2003.

In 2001, Sharon formed a broad-based unity government. In the 2003 elections, Labor (Mapai) lost seats, and Shinui, a new moderate party, took a comparable though smaller number of Knesset seats. (One is reminded of a British SDP, created in early 1981, when the Tories were dominant and Labour was unreformed, though of course the British SDP was never quite as successful.) After the 2003 elections, Sharon put together a coalition of Likud and religious parties.

Sharon, it became increasingly clear, had concluded that negotiations with the Palestinians would continue to be a dead end at best, as they had been for decades. Israel's best option was thus to withdraw unilaterally from most of the territories occupied in 1967 and still under Israeli control, and to consolidate behind a security fence. Such a fence had long separated the Gaza strip from pre-1967 Israel, and most suicide attacks during the intifadahs had originated in the West Bank. Starting in 2003, Sharon aggressively advanced his disengagement plan of withdrawing settlements -- though only from the Gaza strip. In the meantime, the security fence in the West Bank continued to be built. Sharon never articulated his plan with complete candor, partly because to do so would repudiate the negotiated-withdrawal ``Roadmap'' of the ``Quartet'' group. An explicit explanation was also unnecessary because, apart from some West Bank settlers in denial, most people understood the plan. Everyone else understands that after the fence is complete, Jewish settlements outside the fence will be abandoned one way or another.

The majority of Sharon's own party (Likud) always opposed unilateral withdrawal, and most of Sharon's political moves from 2003 to 2005 were directed at pushing through the withdrawal over Likud objections. His in-party opponents demanded that the withdrawal be approved by a vote of party members. The vote was held and Sharon lost it, but he pursued his policy within the Knesset, reorganizing his governing coalition in 2004 into another unity government that included Labor. In the second half of 2005, he resigned from Likud and created a new centrist party called Kadima (`forward'). New Knesset elections were scheduled for March 28, 2006, and it looked like Kadima would be in a strong position to form the next government and probably complete Sharon's plan. Polls showed Kadima drawing its strength mostly at the expense of Likud, and becoming the new dominant party in Knesset, though with fewer seats (polling between 31 and 39) than Likud held in the existing Knesset (40).

In December 2005, Sharon suffered a minor stroke, and on January 4, 2006, he suffered a massive stroke that left him in a coma. Under the nominally provisional leadership of Ehud Olmert, polls showed Kadima winning only slightly fewer seats.

BIBI
BIlingualism & BIculturalism.

Bible
The word Bible is derived from the Greek tà biblía which translates the Hebrew ha-sefarim; the phrases mean `the books.'

BIBLID
BIBLiographic IDentification. System for identifying contributions in serials and books - ISO 9115.

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Bibliographie analytique
Bibliographie analytique de l'Afrique antique. Originally published as a supplement to the journal BAA.

bibliography
Bibliography to most people is a count noun (in a couple of senses) referring to a list of written works (usually published ones). Bibliographies are common tools of scholarly and scholastic research, and some bibliographies are published as works or periodicals entire in themselves. (See, for examples, BHA and Bibliographie analytique. Just to top it off, have a look at Archibald MacLeish: A Selectively Annotated Bibliography by Helen E. Ellis and Bernard A. Drabeck with Margaret E.C. Howland (1995).) Words like discography and filmography have been modeled on bibliography.

Naturally, that's not what I want to write about. I want to write about the uncountable noun bibliography, which refers not -- or not mainly -- to the creation of bibliographies, but to a scholarly activity that is only marginally related to the creation of bibliographies. This other kind of bibliography is now more often called ``textual criticism.'' It is the activity of attempting to retrieve the most accurate possible text of a work, or (if the author or others modified it) to construct an accurate revision history of a work.

Whew! Well started is half done, they say, so I shouldn't have but a couple of paragraphs to go once I track down the various books I want to cite on this topic. Well, here's something to mention that's already on the web, on ``The Little Professor blog for December 17, 2007. (Alright, it was on the web. Apparently typepad only archives the last week or so of the month for this blog.) In a blog entry entitled ``Profession 2007: `Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion','' the blogger (a Victorianist in the English department at Syracuse or some other college in upstate New York) makes ``some scattered observations about'' the named report and the comments on it.

``Disciplinary Societies and Evaluating Scholarship: A View from History'': Stanley N. Katz rightly expresses bafflement that ``historical editing and bibliography'' (91) have been consistently devalued at RI campuses. The editors and bibliographers are frequently responsible for making our research possible in the first place! Moreover, even with the advent of new software and other technologies, editing and bibliography is time-consuming, exhausting labor (especially if the editor in question is working with manuscripts).

Lack of appreciation for their crucial hard work is a perennial complaint of bibliographers, one which I can easily document back to the late 1950's. Great! I'm finally making progress on this entry. Now I only have three or four more paragraphs to go.

BIBO
Bounded Input Bounded Output. A kind of stability in an input-output mapping: bounded inputs yield bounded outputs. In the simple idealization of instantaneous response (no convolution) this simply means that the transfer function has discontinuities that are at most jump discontinuities, and that there is an upper bound on the magnitude of the discontinuities. Cf. the stronger stability type CICO.

BIBOR
Bangkok InterBank-Offered Rate.

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BibOr
Bibliotheca Orientalia. `Library of Oriental [things].' A journal published in Leiden. In most western European languages, the word meaning `library' is something like biblioteca and the cognate of the English word library means bookstore. If this amuses, you'll want to visit the faux ami entry.

BIBTA
British Isles Baton Twirling Association. Go to their homepage and buy something. For less meretricious organizations (including the British Isles Majorette Association BIMA), see the majorette entry.

Bic, BiC
A brand of pens and other disposable products manufactured by a company founded by Baron Marcel Bich and Édouard Buffard in 1945. The company went public in 1958, but the Bich family still has a controlling interest. The company was originally called la Société PPA (for Porte-plume, Porte-mines et Accessoires), but in 1953 became Société BiC.

This French Wikipédia page implies that Bich was shortened to BiC because the latter is easily identifiable and pronounceable in all languages. That's certainly somewhat plausible. The first foreign market entered was Italy (1954), where the two spellings would have to be regarded as equivalent, and closed syllables ending in /k/ are not part of the standard dialect, and are difficult for many Italians to pronounce. The second foreign market entered was Brazil (1956), where Bic and Bich are again both strange but pronounceable. Bich would likely have been pronounced as in French. In 1957 BiC expanded sales to the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and Scandinavia, and in 1958 to the US and the Middle East. I have read in one of my books on the history of pens that Baron Bich decided to market as Bic upon being informed of how ``Bich'' would be pronounced and understood in English. Bic products are now marketed in more than 162 countries (according to the same wiki page).

BIC
Book Industry Communication.

BIC
Bronx Irish Catholic. Term is attested in Michael Pearson's Dreaming of Columbus : Boyhood in the Bronx.

BIC
Business Information Center. As in The Thomas J. Mahaffey, Jr. Business Information Center at ND.

BICBW
But I Could Be Wrong.

B-ICI
Broadband InterCarrier Interface. ATM term.

B-ICI SAAL
B-ICI Signaling ATM Adaptation Layer.

BICM
Bit-Interleaved Coded Modulation.

BiCMOS
Logic combining BJT's and CMOS gates. [CMOS logic uses little power or space, but can be slowed by a large output load; BJT's (TTL or ECL logic, in practice) are used for power drive to accelerate speed-critical bottlenecks.] [Pronounced ``by-SEE-moss.''] Compare in-principle more general term BiMOS.

Exponential Technology, a startup planning to roll out PowerPC compatible chips in early 1997, argues that bipolar is not a space hog, and that current conventional BiCMOS fabrication, with bipolar piggybacked on an essentially CMOS fab sequence, does not exploit the full potential of bipolar.

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BICS
Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies. You want to know which institute of classical studies? Beats me. Flick your Bic and see what happens. ISSN 0951-1253.

BICU
Biocular Image Control Unit. Not binocular, but ``biocular.'' It's innovative technology, see? You don't? Okay then, read my lips (as I type the words): military procurement jargon.

BID
Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo. Spanish for `Inter-American Development Bank' (IADB or IDB.)

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b.i.d.
Twice a day. [Latin: bis in die.]

Often, this shows up on the label as ``take one tablet twice a day.'' This is easy the first time, but I recommend taking a different pill the second time than the first time. The pill you took once already is in no condition to be taken again.

bidding conventions in bridge
Bidding conventions in bridge are calls intended as communications rather than as proposed contracts. For your convenience, information about bidding conventions in contract bridge is scattered alphabetically all over this glossary. See (As you may have gathered, this list is under construction.)

bidding in bridge
The four players in a bridge game form two teams (called partnerships). In ordinary life, that would mean that three players gang up on one, but this is a card game, so it's two on two. The two players in a partnership face each other at the table (North and South, or East and West; see contract bridge entry if this makes no sense). This is congenial, but they're not supposed to cup their hands and whisper to each other. After the cards are dealt, there follows a ceremony known as bidding. Going clockwise around the table (counterclockwise in the Southern Hemisphere) (just kidding), each player makes a call. The call may be a pass or a bid. (A bid may be a regular bid, a double, or a redouble. In some ways of speaking, a ``regular bid'' is just called a bid, and doubling or redoubling is not.)

A regular bid consists of a natural number from one to seven and ``a suit.'' A suit in this context is clubs, diamonds, hearts, spades, or no-trump. Regular bids are ordered: a higher number always corresponds to a higher bid, and if the numbers are the same, then the bid with the higher-ranking suit is the higher bid (in the previous sentence, the suits are listed in order of increasing rank).

If all four players pass after the deal, there is a new deal. If there is a bid in the first go-round, then bidding continues until three successive players pass, which means that you can't raise your own bid.

A player may double if the last bid was a regular bid by an opposing player, and may redouble if the last bid was a double by an opposing player. (When 7 no-trump is redoubled, bidding ends immediately and everyone chants.)

This entry is actually something of a mock-up, inserted so that other entries with links to it have an it to link to. It's not finished, in other words.

bidding systems in bridge
For your convenience, information about bidding systems in contract bridge is scattered alphabetically all over this glossary. See (As you may have gathered, this list is under construction.)

bidet
A low oblong ceramic sink with plumbing that sprays water upwards. Used in Europe, virtually unknown in the US, Crocodile Dundee notwithstanding. This may reflect the frequency with which people once took baths.

For some reason, the bidet is used principally by women. I guess that's because it's about the right size to serve as a baby's bath. Yeah, that's it.

BIDS
Bath Information and Data Services. I think this is ``Bath'' as in Bath, England.

Recent archaeological research suggests that the baths at Bath were not Roman but Celtic. Quite surprising if true.

bier
Something for holding a human corpse -- either a coffin or a raised stand for laying a body or an occupied coffin. A word of Germanic origin, like beer. There's a well-known Japanese proverb near the end of the drunk entry that might best be spoken in English as

First the man takes a beer,
then the beer takes a beer,
then the bier takes the man.

For those of you studying the plain-text print-out version (or just carrying it around for the exercise), ``drunk entry'' above is the specific entry for the term drunk (high-lighted as a link in hypertext); more than one entry seems to have been written under the influence of liquid inspiration.

Bier
German word for `beer.' Yes -- a cognate, like Italian birra. An important word in any language.

BIER
Behavior Integrated Entity Relationship (model). A data model described in ``A Methodology for Computer Modeling of Information Systems Based on the Extended Entity Relationship Model BIER'' by Christian Gierlinger, A. Min Tjoa and Roland R. Wagner, all of FAW in Austria. The notes are on pp. 566-584 of an volume described at the NLC entry.

BIF
Banded Iron Formation. Sedimentary iron deposits in the form of finely layered alternations of cherty silica and an iron mineral, typically hematite, magnetite, or siderite.

_BIF
Battery InFormation. An AML object or method. (That's right: an object-oriented machine language. When your machine is virtual, it can do virtually anything with ease.)

BIF
Beam-Induced Fluorescence.

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BIFAO
Bulletin de l'Institut français d'archéologie orientale. `Bulletin of the French Institute of Oriental Archaeology [IFAO].'

BiFET, BIFET
BIdirectional Field-Effect Transistor (vide FET).

BIFFY
B... In the F... Forest Yourself. The ellipses are not for the sake of discretion; I simply forgot. I'm tempted to leave the entry in this intriguing general form. OTOH, I'm also tempted to find any excuse to chat with the attractive woman who told me the expansion, so I'll probably find out pretty quick. It's ``Bathroom In the Forest For You.''

Looks like my memory was alcohol-impaired. Maybe my judgment was impaired too. I better see her again as soon as possible to learn some more travelling-with-children acronyms and to confirm the accuracy of my recollection that she's one hot babe.

(Yes, my selfless devotion to this glossary is the stuff of legend.)

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BIFG
Bolletino dell'Istituto di Filologia greca dell'Università di Padova.

BIGA
Biodiversidad en Galicia. The acronym BIGA apparently occurs primarily as part of the name of Asociación BIGA and its Bóletin BIGA (ISSN 1886-4546).

bigamy
A word that is technically a barbarism, since it combines Latin and Greek roots: Latin bi- (`twice, double') and Greek gamos (`mate'). The i in bi- is usually long in English, particularly when stressed, so the standard short-i pronunciation of the bi- in bigamy is exceptional. It improves the pun in ``Big Love,'' title of a 2006 TV series about a polygamist and his wives. If that goes into French syndication, the title translation may be interesting.

The word bigamy itself entered English in the thirteenth century from Old French, in the form bigame (< medieval Latin bigamus), without too much legal baggage. Besides the conventional sense they have today, bigame and the modern form bigamy also had the meaning in Ecclesiastical Law of marrying a second time, possibly legally (typically after the death of one's first spouse, since the Catholic Church did not countenance divorce). That is not to say that whether a second marriage was contracted legally or not was insignificant. Until the reign of William III, bigamy in Christian England was punishable by death. Of course, as Anne Boleyn and many others discovered, having a spouse who can't get a divorce may not be less fatal.

Just to be slightly technical, bigamy is the name of the crime in which a person already legally married contracts a second marriage (in a jurisdiction where the first marriage is recognized). There is no need to define separate crimes for differing degrees of polygamy or oligogamy -- tri- or (preferably, I think) ter-gamy, quadrigamy, etc. -- since each subsequent marriage contracted during a valid first marriage is already a distinct individual crime of bigamy. For what to do when charged, see trigamy defense. For some egregious instances of modern bigamy, look under McBride.

If you want to make a distinction, the state of holy, or unholy, or any-remaining-optionsly matrimony between one man and two women is bigyny, and a similar arrangement between one woman and two men is biandry. Actually, these words (and the nonbarbaric di- versions) don't exist (polygamy, polygyny, and polyandry do), but I created them to make a point. There was a time when it was needless to specify that marriage involving one man and two women meant two marriages -- each involving the man and one of the women. When one recognizes, as some jurisdictions do, the possibility of two persons of the same sex being legally married, it becomes possible for any three individuals (above a certain age of consent, for now) to contract three distinct marriages. This gives rise to interesting possibilities. For example, if two women marry in a jurisdiction where that is legal, and one of them subsequently marries a man in another jurisdiction where same-sex marriages are not recognized, then the wife in the second marriage might be a bigamist in the first jurisdiction, even though the second marriage was legally entered into. How can the first jurisdiction pretend to accept the legality of marriages performed in the second if they are bigamous in its own? Of course, if the wording of the bigamy statutes carelessly assumed that only persons of different sexes marry, there might be no problem.

Andrew Koppelman's Same Sex, Different States (Yale U.P., 2006), has something to say about the important difficulties posed in the preceding paragraph. (I'll summarize to the glossary if I ever have the time to read and digest this. Pending that, you might as well know that there's a relevant book.)

BIGAPE
The Bwindi-Impenetrable Great Ape ProjEct.

Big Bang
A major event, such as

Big Blue
IBM. Employees were called Beemers. Cf. BMW.

Big Blue Meatball
Pan Am. Died a lingering death, finally pushed into bankruptcy by the bombing of flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1991. (The two suspects in the bombing were long on the FBI's 10-most-wanted list, and the old Pan Am is still in bankruptcy court; various bits and pieces of Lockerbie are still working their way through the legal system.)

In September 1996 a new company started flying under the same name and logos, and even some of the same management, using three A-330's.

big-cap
adj.: big capitalization. Large corporation. On its way to becoming big it was probably a blue chip for a while. Whether or not it still is one, it will still be called that. (It is one in the sense that it is big-cap, but the colloquial sense of ``blue-chip'' is large, stable and reliably profitable.)

Big Eight

Big Four, big four

Big Love
The title of an American TV series (produced, written, and directed by committees) that began airing in 2006, and the title of a 2001 play by American playwright Charles L. Mee. The play is a reworking of The Suppliant Women of Aeschylus. According to Fiona Mountford's review for the London Evening Standard, ``The bare bones of the plot remain the same: 50 sisters have fled their homeland to escape enforced marriages. Yet now, thanks to Mee, these prototype asylum seekers also have a lack of premium-grade cosmetics to worry about.'' If you like it, you can call it ``whimsical.'' It doesn't seem to be any worse than the usual travesty.

Hmm... 50 daughters of Danaeus... maybe Mee's play gave Tom Hanks and the other producers their idea.

Big Ten
A college athletic conference of eleven big public universities, predominantly in the US Midwest: Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Michigan State, Minnesota, Northwestern, Ohio State, Penn State, Purdue, Wisconsin.

Notice how concentrated these names are in the middle of the alphabet. It's because the states are in the middle of the country. States that are at the extreme ends of the country, like Alaska and Washington, are on the ends of the alphabet. Sure.

In 1998-9, Notre Dame considered an invitation to join, but eventually decided to stay independent.

Big Three, big three

Big Twelve
A college athletic conference of twelve schools in central states: Baylor, Colorado, Iowa State, Kansas, Kansas State, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Texas, Texas A&M, and Texas Tech.

Big Two
Marvel Comics and DC Comics!

There are other duopolies!

Of course!

But I've actually seen that duopoly called ``Big Two.'' Another US duopoly that comes to mind is that of Kappa Publishing and Dell (the latter bought out Penny Press some years ago), which together dominate the market for cheap crossword-puzzle magazines. I remember reading an interview with a guy at one of those enterprises, in which the fellow says something like ``we always say that between the two of us we have 99% of the market, but really I don't know of anyone else who is even in the business.''

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BIHM
BIchrome, Hand-Made (ancient pottery). Contrast BIWM.

BII
Bioinformatics Institute of India.

bikini
Named after an atoll used to test nuclear weapons, on the reasoning that it too would cause a burst of excitement. A similar transferred sense occurs for blockbuster. The word monokini is a play on the word bikini as a bathing-suit name. For more detail on Bikini, please proceed to the discussion of GILDA.

Bil
BILl. Newspaper editing jargon for odd-looking name. Typical usage: ``Bil in lede graf is cq.'' This means that there's a strangely spelled name in the lead paragraph, but it's correct.

BIL
IATA code for Billings Logan International Airport, serving Billings, MT, USA. Here's its status in real time from the ATCSCC.

This should not be confused with the Logan airport at Boston: BOS.

bil
A short form of the word automobile that is common in Scandinavian languages. It may seem strange, but it hardly makes less sense than ``auto.''

bi-laws
  1. Laws governing, I don't know, bicycles, bisexuals, bigamists?
  2. A misspelling or perhaps a misconstrual of by-laws. For example, on May 6, 2005, the ABC TV affiliate WLOS (``Western North Carolina's New Leader'') reported a membership dispute at East Waynesville Baptist Church. Pastor Chan Chandler told nine members that if they didn't support George W. Bush, they should resign or repent. They were expelled, and forty others left in protest. Although he declined an interview with WLOS, the minister did explain that ``the actions were not politically motivated.'' According to the WLOS website, ``there are questions about whether the bi-laws were followed.''
  3. (With capitalization) rules governing the Bank of Indonesia.

If you think I put in this entry just to have a place to mention the news from East Waynesville, you're completely wrong. I put it here because I couldn't find the bye-laws entry.

bilingual
  1. Having a knowledge of two tongues. That's ``tongues'' in the sense of languages. What you do in the privacy of each other's mouths, I'm not interested to know. See also bilingual education.
  2. In various contexts, two particular tongues are clearly implied, and the general term is understood in a restricted sense. For example, in Canadian bureaucratese, bilingual refers to those proficient in French. Hmm, let me check that. Oh, it means fluent in French and English. In much of the US, bilingual meants fluent, okay, maybe not exactly fluent, in Spanish and English.
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  4. Decorated with both red-figure and black-figure art (see BF entry).
  5. Having two tongues. (Well, it could mean that, anyway.)

In Spanish, bilingual is bilingüe. In French, it's bilingue. Not what you expected, huh? German: zweisprachig. Every continent needs an outlier.

bilingual education
Among US educationists, ``bilingual education'' is a sort of monolingual education in the elementary grades. It's the practice of teaching immigrant children with limited English proficiency in their native Spanish. (What? They're bilingual and they don't speak Spanish? How is that possible?) The idea is to prevent them from falling behind while they're developing proficiency in English. The central problem with this idea is that students in bilingual programs get less exposure to and practice in English, so they take longer to develop proficiency, and hence fall further behind. It also happens to be the case that immigrant children with poor English-language skills often have poor language skills in their native language, so bilingual education is no solution to the problem it addresses.

There is a more subtle flaw in the rationale for bilingual education, so-called, and that is the undervaluation of what educationists call ``language arts.'' Geography, history, science, and most subjects in elementary school are less important for their own sakes than as opportunities for mastering the language. A thorough competence in the language and mores of one's society is more important than the other specific knowledge that grade school is supposed to impart. For immigrant children, the need is even more urgent. That is, the metric of utility is more sensitive to language deficiencies at the elementary level than to language deficiencies at an advanced level or to deficiencies in any other grade-school subjects.

The tragedy is that children of elementary-school age are language sponges. Delaying their absorption of the country's main language is a disservice and an opportunity missed. In fact, it is absurd and cruel that children usually do not begin to study second languages until past age 12, when the task begins to be work.</rant>

``Dual-language'' elementary education, also called ``two-way immersion,'' is what you might have supposed bilingual education to be. In dual-language programs, students spend about half of their time in an English classroom environment and half in another language.

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bilingualism
Not a wholly new phenomenon.

Bilingual Women
An assemblage of twelve chapters published in 1994. The contributions are varied in style and approach, so if the subject interests you you'll probably find some of them interesting. Don't be put off by the subtitle (``Anthropological Approaches to Second-Language Use''); it's not overly clotted with academic jargon. The book was edited by Pauline Burton, Ketaki Kushari Dyson, and Shirley Ardener. Burton contributed a thirty-page introduction, Dyson contributed a sort of memoir of her life as a writer, excerpted in this glossary at the entry about editors at publishing houses. Ardener contributed a preface and was also general editor, with Jackie Waldren, of Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Women, the series that this is volume 9 of, published by Berg Publishers (Providence, RI, and Oxford, Oxfordshire [oh-- that Oxford]).

billion
In North America (and in this glossary, unless otherwise indicated): 109. In France and Germany: 1012.

More generally, in the US scheme, a numerical prefix bi-, tri-, etc. before -illion counts the number of factors of a thousand multiplying the first thousand; in the other popular scheme the prefix refers to the number of factors of a million. Thus, trillion = 1012 (Amer.) and 1018 (traditional Br., current Fr. and Ger.), etc.

In Britain today, and in much of the British Commonwealth outside North America, the situation is perched uneasily between the two conventions. Generally speaking, the traditional British sense of billion coincides with the current French meaning (1012), but there have been a number of moves toward aligning usage with the US convention. There are some indications [Ftnt. 17] that the American usage, consonant with the factors-of-1000 SI prefix usage, is gaining greater acceptance in Britain, but it is still too ambiguous to use without qualification or fear of misunderstanding. The French meaning has also varied; the American meaning of billion corresponds to an earlier French definition.

In German and French ``milliard'' is 109; British English has that word (cf. Mrd), but the British have tended to use ``thousand million,'' as the Moody Blues did in a song called ``Question'').

See the entry "`billion': a U.K. view" in the alt.english.usage FAQ. There's also a history of the Sagan "billions and billions."

``A billion here, a billion there -- pretty soon it adds up to real money.''

-- the wisdom of Everett McKinley Dirksen (1896-1969).

``There are very few things we'll spend a billion dollars on just because they're cool.''

-- John Connolly, an engineer in NASA's Exploration Office, commenting on the possibility of another manned mission to the moon (Discover magazine, September 1998, p. 75).

Billy Beer
A beer named after failed president Jimmy Carter's maladroit bumpkin brother, a former agent for a major north African country.

Billy Reuben
Unlike Billy Joe, Billy Bob, and Joe Bob, Billy Reuben is not a name characteristic of the southeastern US region. You probably heard bilirubin, the reddish bile pigment made by the liver from broken down old red blood cells, you idiot.

When the liver is diseased, this pigment may fail to be excreted through the bile duct and instead accumulate in the body. This turns the whites of the eyes yellow and causes a yellowish discoloration of the skin, a condition called jaundice. Jaundice occurs in various kinds of chronic poisoning, including alcohol-related cirrhosis of the liver, and by at least five viral diseases (see hepatitis).

BIMA
Berkeley Illinois Maryland Array.

BIMA
British Isles Majorette Association. (Their net presence is a bit confusing. In case of problems, this or this.) For similar organizations, see the majorette entry. BIMA is a different entity than the British Isles Baton Twirling Association BIBTA.

bima
A Hebrew word meaning `raised place' (a more literal transliteration is bimah, but the final Hebrew letter he is silent in modern pronunciations). Jewish synagogues contain a raised platform or podium that is called a bima by most Jews in Europe and the Americas, although there are other traditional names also in use. The word bima has been borrowed into Polish with the meaning of `stage.'

The bima has a table on which a bible scroll is placed for reading (see megilla). The bima serves other obvious purposes, but practice varies. There is usually at least one lectern which is more convenient for reading less awkward books. (Haftorah readings are normally from a codex, and much of the service consists of the recitation of prayers rather than the reading of canonically holy books.)

Traditionally, the bima has been at the center of the room; the Talmud mentions (Suk. 51b) a wooden pulpit in the center of the synagogue of Alexandria. In Oriental and Sephardi synagogues there are usually no chairs between the bima and the front wall, where the torah scrolls are kept in an ark. This doesn't make very efficient use of space, according to some notions of ``efficient.'' Maimonides opined (you could look it up) that it's okay to have some chairs between the bima and the ark, and many Orthodox synagogues follow this.

I've been in at least a couple of Orthodox Ashkenazi synagogues (one Hasidic, one not) where the bima was at the front. So it's clear that the bima location is not a big hang-up for everyone, but early in the twentieth century it was a bone of contention the size of a brontosaur femur. Brontosaur isn't kosher, in case you were wondering. At least, I'm sure it would be treyf (i.e., not kosher) today. This might not be an entirely academic or talmudical issue. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago cited a news item about prehistoric fish or salamander preserved in a frozen stream. It was reportedly so fresh that the people who found it devoured the meat before it could be studied. However, since we don't want to go off on a tangent, we'll relegate further discussion of that to a future GULAG entry.

You know, the kosherness of well-aged and too-well-aged meat is a lot more interesting than bima position, so let's talk about that. My friend Dan had an interesting thought on the subject. When Dan was 12 years old, he and a friend and Dan's kid brother Lou made a comic-book parody (or perhaps a travesty) called ``The Adventures of Stupidman.'' The hero was transported back in time to before the exodus from Egypt, and the first thing he did was go and have himself a meal of pork, since it wasn't treyf yet then. I guess this is one possible interpretation of whatchamightcall the question of when a particular one of God's laws is ``in vigor,'' based on the legal fiction of a covenant. They sold 160 copies; it must be collector's item.

UNDER CONSTRUCTION, okay? (That means it's not finished.)

BIMBO
Buy-In Management Buy-Out. It's a compromise between an MBO and an MBI, which have the expansions you'd expect. I'm sure you could find out about these things on the Internet.

At Princeton University, where I went to graduate school, the graduate students' ``residential college'' (local name for dorm complex, roughly) is called the Graduate College (GC). In the basement it has a bar (``The Debasement Bar''). One evening there I found B__ (a mechanical engineer pal) with a cute airhead townie that he'd met on a bus. In those days I was even ruder than I am today, and I happened to utter a sentence that contained the word bimbo. I don't remember what the sentence was, but I do remember that she heard the word. She seemed to be about equal parts

(This was pretty typical, in my experience of giving offense.) The amazement/disbelief part may have worked in our favor, as we smoothly transitioned into damage-control mode: B__ and I managed to convince her, or she decided to pretend to believe us, that BIMBO is a COBOL keyword. We went on for a bit, ragging on what a crazy language COBOL is. It's just an ironic coincidence I discovered recently, that BIMBO actually is a commercial and business-oriented language keyword.

B__ assured me the next day that my unguarded comment hadn't been a problem. Ah -- business giveth, and business taketh away. Or maybe it's the other way around. I'm thinking of the anecdotes described in the long paragraph about (actually not much about) Joseph Black.

It occurs to me now that some readers may misdoubt my veracity. Those who've read the VTVM entry might suppose that this entry is, similarly, only loosely fact-based, with the COBOL thing as just a bit of amusing creativity. Well, it was a bit of amusing creativity, but we created it on the spot. B__ also achieved local fame for inventing a billiards variant.

BiMOS
Any circuits and logic combining MOS transistors and BJT's fabricated on the same chip. [Common strategy: low power CMOS logic, plus BJT's for power drive.] [Pronounced ``BY-moss.''] All BiCMOS is BiMOS logic. Not all BiMOS is BiCMOS.

BINAC
Binary Automatic Computer. A vintage-1949 computer that used 700 vacuum tubes and I have no idea how many mercury delay lines. It occupied a paltry 20 square feet.

Binaca
A spray aerosol breath freshener. They sell mints now too.

I think they should do what the underarm deodorant and antiperspirant marketers did: come out with roll-on products. This sounds stupid now, but it's not any more stupid than those sheet-thin menthol chews that began to be marketed in 2003-2004. We introduced an entry here for the ``Suburban Conquistador'' before we learned that Cadillac and Lincoln were marketing their own SUV's.

BIND
Berkeley Internet Name Domain. Unix implementation of DNS.

binding
I explain everything I know about book bindings -- actually about the writing along the spine, at the MBH entry. So here we can take a relaxing break. I was browsing among the cheap used books when my attention was arrested by the title Report of the Committee of Experts. When I picked it up it was upside-down. That is, the lettering along the spine had been oriented so that the bottoms of the letters were closer to the front cover than the back. Some experts. Sure enough: printed in Switzerland.

It's a very reliable phenomenon. The next time I noticed a book with upside-down English spine text, it was Special Forces in the Invasion of France by Paul Gaujac, a translation of his French original (Les forces spéciales de la Libération), published by Histoire & Collections.

Okay, I finally came across a legitimate domestic instance: Public Policy and the Dead Hand, by Lewis M. Simes, part of the Thomas M. Cooley Lectures at the University of Michigan. It was published by the University of Michigan Law School in 1955, which is not so long ago that printing downward along the spine was not standard. The book was manufactured by Twentieth Century Printing Co., Inc., of Baltimore, Maryland.

Okay, let's eye-dropper some information onto this entry. A magazine with a paperback-like binding -- a narrow side perpendicular to front and back covers -- is said to be ``perfect-bound.''

Bilingual books may pose a problem, but here's a practical solution that I haven't seen much of lately. The volume before me is two books. One book has the title of Proceedings of the Canadian Congress of Correction 1957: Montréal May 26-29, 1957, and was published by the Canadian Corrections Association of the Canadian Welfare Council. I imagine it has something to do with editorial work, given the thoughtful publication scheme. (There'd be a lot more editorial work to do, of course, if it were the American Corrections Association of the British Welfare Council, or vice versa.)

The other book has the title Le Rapport du Congrès canadien sur la Délinquance, 1957: Montréal du 26 au 29 mai 1957, and it's from La Société canadienne de Criminologie du Conseil canadien du Bien-être. I guess it was one of those joint-conference things, like APA/AIA meetings. Just so as not to show any bias, I suppose that presentations were in a neutral language -- probably Swahili. Anyway, to get back to the interesting issue: the volume is bound together like one of those flippable paired novels now regretably so rare. If you read to the end of one book and turn the page, the print on the next page appears upside-down. The volume is about 4 cm thick, so the binding is wide enough to allow the short titles to be printed across the top (i.e., the respective tops) of the binding. For a little more about how that worked, see W.F. CARABINE.

binge drinking
Typically defined by researchers as five drinks or more in a row. This definition is not a model of precision. I know at least one dance club that served drinks in test tubes, which the barmaids brought around in attractive test tube racks (not their own attractive racks, you understand). They were in a row, at least, but five of those, believe me, were no binge.

BInstNDT
British INSTitute of Non-Destructive Testing. That abbreviation looks like someone didn't know when to stop turning the knob on the micrometer.

biodiesel
Processed vegetable oil with properties approximating diesel fuel's. Biodiesel is generally made by transesterification. Important examples are RME and SME (rapeseed and soybean methyl ethers, resp.).

Transesterification generally is like a reaction between a relatively strong base and a salt. In the latter reaction, the strong base combines with the anion of the salt, and the cation of the base forms a (weaker) base. Transesterification works the same way, except that instead of salts one has esters, instead of cations one has oxyalkanes, and instead of acids in general one has organic acids. The organic acids of the original esters form new esters with the added alcohols, and release the original bonding partners as alcohols.

Transesterification was investigated during WWII as a source of glycerine needed for explosives. Probably the usual source of glycerine is the saponification process, so I guess that during WWII, people were not washing as much as usual. Either that, or they were using more nitroglycerine than usual. Transesterification of oils and fats is also similar to saponification, except that instead of glycerine and soap, one produces glycerine and fatty-acid esters. Thus, for example, RME is a mix of methyl esters of rapeseed fatty acids.

The great disadvantage of using straight vegetable oils (SVO's) as substitutes for diesel fuel is their much higher viscosity. The high viscosity can be understood crudely. (Like raw, undistilled petroleum or uncooked vegetable oil, get it? Oh, never mind.) To understand the general trends, one must recognize two qualitative sources of viscosity: deformation within the fatty acids of a triglyceride (fat or oil) molecule, and deformation of the molecule as a whole.

To take the second part first: fat and oil molecules are sort of dendritic. They consist of three long fatty acids that can rotate about a common axis of the three carbons of the glycerine, functioning as rather limber knuckles. Adjacent oil molecules become entangled, giving rise to viscosity. Transesterification separates the individual fatty acids, so that they don't entangle as three connected fingers but as individual fingers. (Don't imagine this too literally before lunch unless you're on a diet.) This substantially reduces the viscosity.

The principal difference between oils and fats is in the degree of saturation. Complete saturation means that carbon chains have as many hydrogen atoms as are possible for their chain topology. A monounsaturated chain has a single double bond, and each of the two carbons participating in the double bond has one less hydrogen than it would have if completely saturated. Polyunsaturated chains have more double bonds. Double bonds do not rotate freely, so less saturated chains are more rigid, and conversely.

Higher rigidity on a molecular scale in this case means lower rigidity on a macroscopic scale. Again intuitively: a disordered aggregation of rigid rods does not entangle and clump, but instead spreads out. Viewed on a large length scale at which individual rods cannot be distinguished, this is basically liquid behavior. Saturated fatty acids (i.e., those with no double bonds) correspond to floppy strings or chains rather than to rigid rods, and can form a pile or clump (this isn't the usual technical language, okay?). Hence, saturated fatty acids are more viscous or solid on a macroscopic scale.

Thus, it is fats (as opposed to oils) that are generally more highly saturated. They are more viscous than oils of comparable molecular mass at a given temperature. Equivalently, fats solidify at higher temperatures. That's why, to create a low-viscosity biofuel, one wants to transesterify oils rather than fats.

bioethics
UB has a Center for Clinical Ethics and Humanities in Health Care. I've always wondered what clinical humanities might be.

biography, major
I found an informative little semiquantitative tidbit (revealed in the last block quote of the present entry) valuable because those who know this stuff from experience can be reluctant to divulge it. (Microelectronic fabrication engineers are the same way about yield rates.) If you're interested in biography, especially literary biography, you should read The Shadow in the Garden: A Biographer's Tale. It's by James Atlas, the source of that semiquantitative tidbit.

But first, let's have a lot of superfluous context. The quotation is from the introduction (starting at page ix) to James Atlas's biography of Saul Bellow (pp. xiv + 686 -- do the math). At the age of xxviii, Atlas had published a biography of ``the poet Delmore Schwartz.'' (Oh, that Delmore Schwartz. Delmore is such a common name, you know. Is it really so snobbish to sneer at such thumbnail clarifications here? Can it really be thought uncondescending to readers of an adult-size biography of Saul Bellow, to suggest that they do not know who Delmore Schwartz was? For more of this snitty snoottiness, see the .se entry. Yeah, I'm shooting for some sibilant tongue twisters.) His biographies of Saul Bellow and Delmore Schwartz are the two for which James Atlas is best known. James does not appear to be related to Charles Atlas, except probably through Charlemagne.

Anyway, Atlas (James Atlas, not the body-builder and fantastic, historic adman) had been pegged as a career biographer and was casting about for his next victim, err, subject. He had already signed a contract with Farrar, Straus & Giroux to do the authorized biography of Edmund Wilson. (``America's gratest modern man of letters,'' okay? Yeah, ``greatest,'' ``gratingest,'' whatever.) But after five years Atlas ``hadn't written a word.'' [I've seen the term over-literal a lot. In fairness, under-literal is a more common fault.] Maybe he should've tried mapping him. Atlas writes that he loved Wilson's work -- he'd ``read every word he'd written'' (and published, I suppose). However...

I had a toxic response to his character. The bullying proclamations, the tedious self-revelations, the drinking and philandering--
All that juicy material! On the one hand, we see that James Atlas has a gift for thumbnail characterizations. On the hand with the other thumbnail, we see that he failed to appreciate the value of a good salacious ogre of a subject.
--in the end, he just didn't appeal to me as a subject to whose life and work I was willing to apprentice myself for the better part of a decade, the time any conscientious biographer of a major personage can expect to allot.
If he regards his own biography of Delmore Schwartz as conscientious, then I suppose he started it in college. Anyway, this was the point: you must devote the better part of a decade to do justice to a great literary life.

My experience of romance writing was similar to Atlas's experience of Wilson biographizing. I had planned a first book in the genre. (I had read an entire romance paperback. I also skimmed two more.) I hadn't signed a contract with Mr. Strauss yet, but my cousin Victoria and I had come up with a great nom de plume for me. Yet I had a toxic response--in the end, romance novelizing didn't appeal to me as anything that I could endure for the better part of ten minutes. I once belonged to a writers' group that was run by a couple who wrote romance novels. I was drummed out. I was drummed out of two writers' groups I attended. The third just stopped meeting, or so I was told.

BTW, this James Atlas is the same James Atlas who gets a brief mention at the periodization puns in book titles entry, for My Life in the Middle Ages: A Survivor's Tale. The dust jacket of that book mentions that he ``is the founder of Atlas Books and the general editor of the Eminent Lives series.''

Biola
The ``Biola'' in Biola University is an acronym of its original name -- Bible Institute Of Los Angeles. Its history page manages to elide this. (It's not as if they're trying to hide the embarrassing fact that they're evangelical -- they're pretty up-front about that. It's probably just acronym anxiety.)

Biola is also a fair transliteration of the Japanese word for viola. There are now some katakana characters for syllables beginning with a vee sound, and the appropriate one is used in one Japanese spelling of viola, but in practice a bee sound is used.

[column]

bios
The usual word for `life' in ancient Greek, and the root of the obvious morpheme in English words like biography, biology, biopsy, biosphere, biota, biotic, biotin, biotite, bioturbation, and biotype, and aerobe, amphibious, anhydrobiosis, microbiology, and symbiosis.

This word had a high or rising pitch accent on the iota, so with accent, it was written bíos (combining form bío-). This was an instance where the accent was semantically useful (see next). The semantic field corresponding to the English words `life, living' was shared in ancient Greek primarily by bíos and zôê. (I can't easily add an acute accent to the eta; just pretend it's there.) The latter word, meaning essentially `animal life,' is etymon of English words like zoo, zoology, and zootrophy (not something you win at the zoo).

[column]

bios
`Bow' (as in bow-and-arrow), in ancient Greek. This is one of the few instances in which the polytonic accent system disambiguates words in written Greek (apart from function words). The accents were introduced by some Byzantine scribbler. Before that time, a pun on biós (`bow') and bíos involved perfect homographs. (You read the previous entry, right? Don't hop around the glossary; you'll destroy the logic of the presentation!)

The earliest recorded bios pun, so far as I am aware, is due to that madcap philosopher Hê -- see the mad cap? -- rakleitos of Ephesos (more usually in English we use the Latinized form Heraclitus of Ephesus):

Bow has the name of life, but the work of death.

This has Diels-Kranz fragment number 22-48 (fifth and later editions; 12-66 in earlier). The unaccented Greek reads

bios: tôi oun toxôi onoma bios, ergon de thanatos.
Heraclitus lived and probably tried out a bow around 500 B.C.; now he's dead.

There doesn't seem to be any English word which this biós serves as a root of.

BIOS
Basic Input/Output System.

BIOSIS
BIOSciences Information Service.

biosphere
The thin spherical scum on the surface of the earth -- cabbage and roaches, people and bacteria.

There's an awful lot of biomass in bacteria, and a lot in water, but here's something: bacteria (like actors) prefer to live in films. The surface of water with air or a solid has a high concentration of solutes that bacteria think of as nutrients, and protozoans that like to have bacteria for lunch encounter a little difficulty in penetrating surfaces. There are always a few free bacteria around, but even the flagellates go for the films. The thickness of the biosphere, or its depth, is apparently greater than anyone used to suppose. The presence of bacteria in subterranean sedimentary rock as early as the 1920's used to be dismissed as due to contamination after retrieval. Research since the mid-1980's has demonstrated that autochthonous thermophile bacteria and archaea live (low metabolic-rate lives) down to depths of at least a few kilometers, in sedimentary and even igneous rock.

The term biosphere was coined in the nineteenth century by the London-born Austrian geologist Eduard Suess. He slipped it in near the end of a monograph about the Alps. I guess when you've got a neologism you want to introduce, any text will do. [Suess was in many respects the scientific predecessor of Wegener, and he introduced many terms for phenomena that can only be adequately explained by the theory of plate tectonics; Gondwanaland and Tethys Sea were first conjectured and named in his Das Antlitz der Erde (`The Face of the Earth').]

Suess's word biosphere was popularized by the Russian geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky in the 1920's. Vernadsky was a pioneer in studying the effects of life on the atmosphere and the earth's crust, and is thus regarded as the founder of the theory of the biosphere. He also gave some currency to a related term, noosphere (q.v.). This latter term was apparently introduced by that infamous mystic P. Teilhard de Chardin in his L'Hominisation (1925). By this term (noosphère in French) he meant that part of the biosphere occupied by thinking humanity. This was supposed to include both red and blue states. Just as the noosphere is a subset (or subspace or subregion or sub-something) of the biosphere, so the blogosphere is a subset of the noosphere. We could take this further and define a newsosphere as a subset of the blogosphere, but we won't. We'll just suggest it and let someone else run with that sphere.

BIOTAS
BIOlogical Investigations of Terrestrial Antarctic Systems. One of SCAR's major programs.

BIP
Bit Interleaved Parity.

BIP
Books In Print. A standard reference. Now available by subscription online.

BIP
Built-In Purifier.

BIPAC
Business Industry Political Action Committee. I didn't know that business was an industry either.

BIPAP
BI-level Positive Airway Pressure. A kind of Continuous Positive Airway Pressure (CPAP).

BIPH
Oh, brother have you ever got to update your address book! When your computer catches a virus you only infect phantom limbs. See RIPHH.

BIPM
Bureau International des Poids et Mesures. The ``international bureau of weights and measures,' at Sèvres, near Paris. (There doesn't appear to be an official English version of the name: it's standardized on the French. It gives me an impish desire to translate it as the ``international desk,'' but I can resist for now. The website is bilingual.)

BIR
Binary Independence Retrieval (model).

BIR
British Institute of Radiology.

BIR
Buil{ ding | t- } In Reliability.

BIR
Bureau of International Recycling. A trade association. I guess when hauling trash becomes a feel-good occupation, a trade association can become a desk.

BIRA
Boletín del Instituto Riva-Agüero. The bulletin of IRA.

No, no: beer is cerveza in Spanish. (And cerveja in Portuguese, cervesa in Catalan.) It's birra in Italian. Spanish does have the word birria, however, that refers to anything horrible or ugly. In Mexico it has the more specific sense of something insipid to drink. I have to wonder if that doesn't reflect American influence and the English word beer.

Bird and Baby
Pet name used by regulars for the Oxford pub which is officially ``The Eagle and Child.'' It was the meeting place for the Inklings.

bird's-beak, or bird's head and beak, or bird's head
Lateral growth of oxide under a nitride (oxidation mask) layer, or similar structure.

birling
A sport discussed to my complete satisfaction at the PBA entry.

B.I.S.
Bachelor of Interdisciplinary Studies.

BIS
Bank for International Settlements. ``The BIS is an international organisation which fosters cooperation among central banks and other agencies in pursuit of monetary and financial stability.''

Just give me muh-uh-uh-uh-ney! Muh-uh-ney -- that's what I need -- That's! What I need!

BIS
Butts In Seats. A figure of merit having to do with the distribution of student bodies. A measure of how successful academic departments have been in making their curves, I mean courses, attractive.

BISAC
Book Industry Systems Advisory Committee. A committee of the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) that promoted use of ISBN and later SAN as well. Founded in 1974. In fall 1998, BISAC and SISAC merged and became BASIC.

B-ISDN, BISDN
Broadband Integrated Services Digital Network.

Jeanne M. Dallard has some links to BISDN documentation at NIST. Whatis?com offers a brief description.

BisFET, BISFET
Bilayer pseudoSpin Field-Effect Transistor.

BISFET
BIStable Field-Effect Transistor. This is an old device (operational device reported in 1993).

BISG
Book Industry Study Group. Publisher-backed. See also the entries for its groups BISAC and SISAC, now merged as BASIC.

BISG also puts out an annual report on the economic health of the book trade. In August 1999, they reported that after a general decline in the mid-nineties, there was an increase by over four percent in trade book sales (adult hard cover and trade paperbacks) from 1997 to 1998 (497 million volumes sold in 1998). 368 million children's books were sold, a six percent increase from a weak 1997, but still below 1996 sales. Unit sales of books about science and technology have been falling since 1995, and this is attributed to increased electronic publishing -- books on disk, CD-ROM, or on the internet.

BISN
Border Information & Solutions Network, an NGO ``dedicated to promoting sustainable development of the US/Mexico border by enhancing networking and communication through the Internet.

BISSI
Broadband Inter Switching System Interface.

bist
German: (you) `are.' [More specifically: the (familiar) second-person singular, present-tense form of the verb sein, `to be.' (Also called copula, a cognate of copulate.)]

BIST
Built-In Self Test[ing]. Logic-circuit testing by circuitry built into a unit. Principal advantage is that it gets around the pin limitation problem (primary inputs -- the inputs that can be controlled from outside the device -- are few; the functions to be tested are many). The test process can also be distributed and therefore local.

Vide error latency and signature analysis.

B-ISUP
Broadband ISDN User's Part.

bisw.
bisweilen. German: `sometimes.'

BISYNC
BInary SYNChronous (communication protocol).

BIT
Bilateral Investment Treaty. A kind of international treaty. Since 1990, many PTA's (preferential trade agreements) have incorporated substantive investment provisions. These combination PTA-BIT's are also called PTIA's (preferential trade and investment agreements).

BIT's have received considerably less press than PTA's. In a paper published online in January 2011, Jeffrey H. Bergstrand and Peter Egger suggest that BIT's are ``at least as significant'' as PTA's. (Bergstrand and various co-authors have been making that argument for a few years, but it's not the point of the cited paper. See references therein.) They note that in 2010, the U.S. had 40 BIT's in force and only 17 PTA's.

bit
Binary digIT.

BIT
Built-In Test.

BIT
Business Information Technology.

BITA
The British Industrial Truck Association. The ITA site looks more contented right now. Just remember to reflect the graphics.

BITA is a member of BMHF.

Bit a BLT
Ate some Bacon, Lettuce, and Tomato sandwich.

BitBLT
Bit-BLock Transfer.

bit bucket
The place where bits are discarded. When, as usually, these are bits of data, the bit bucket can be extremely compact.

BITCH
Being In Total Control, Honey! According to HBI.

BITCH
Black Intelligence Test of Cultural Homogeneity. A test of verbal aptitude and reasoning like the verbal part of the SAT or GRE, but based on black vocabulary. The test was devised by Robert Williams. No, not Robin Williams.

BITCH
Bringing Integrity To Christian Homemakers. ``A Baptist Ladies service organization founded by Mrs. Bowers.'' It ``strives to keep Bible-based conversation to a maximum and nonprocreative sex and frozen foods to a minimum in Christian, professionally decorated homes throughout God's Country, America. Praise the Lord!''

Bitches' Brew
Favorite cocktail of Venedikt Yerofeyev, according to his depressing samizdat book ``Moscow Stations.''

Ingredients:

100 g  Zhiguli Beer
 70 g  Dandruff Treatment
 30 g  ``Sadko'' Shampoo
 30 g  Athlete's Foot Remedy
 20 g  Small Bug Killer

Preparation:
Combine all ingredients and steep for a week in cigar tobacco. Serve.

See Spirit of Geneva for similar recipes and more on the book.

'bitch, The
Extended jail sentences for chronic felons, under haBITual-offender statutes.

BITNET
BEcause It's Time NETwork. An early electronic mail message passing protocol on IBM mainframes. It wasn't obsolete in the 1960's.

BITNET wasn't real-time -- it was occasional. Scheduled message-passing communications became increasingly frequent into the nineties. If you've got an old BITNET address of someone at a university, and you don't think they've moved, then there's a good chance that their old address username@SCHLNM.BITNET has become <username@schlnm.edu>.

BIU
Bus Interface Unit.

[column]

BIWM
BIchrome, Wheel-Made (ancient pottery turned on a potter's wheel). Contrast BIHM.

Bi:2212, Bi(2212)
Bi2Sr2CaCu2O8+y. Also known as ``bisco.'' A popular high-TC superconductor (HTSC).

.bj
(Domain name code for) Bénin (used to be Dahomey). The name has a 'cent marking to indicate that Benin was once a French colony, and that therefore France has the right to invade, occupy, and do anything else there that France would denounce as unilateralism and try to block in the UN if done anywhere by the US, if the French president should feel like it.

Regarding the letter jay in the country code... for what it's worth, the I/J distinction is a relatively recent one. It can't even be indicated in German Fraktur (the original `Gothic script').

[Image: npn BJT schematic]

BJ
Bon Jovi. I think this is great.

BJA
Bureau of Justice Assistance.

BJD
Ball-Joint Doll.

BJD
Bridget Jones's Diary. A book and a movie. I think ``Bridget Jones's Diarrhea'' would make a great name for an eating disorder. It would be more precise than something like ``binge-purge syndrome.''

BJP
Bharatiya Janata Party. The largest Hindu nationalist party.

BJRL
Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester.

BJS
Bureau of Justice Statistics. A ``component'' of the US Office of Justice Programs (OJP).

BJT
Bipolar Junction Transistor. A three-terminal nonlinear device, composed of two bipolar junctions (collector-base, base-emitter) in close proximity. In normal operation, the voltage between base and emitter terminals is used to control the emitter current. The collector current either equals this (with BC junction in reverse bias), or goes into saturation (the BC junction goes into forward bias). Base current is generally much smaller than collector and emitter currents, but not negligible as in MOSFETS.

It's easy to fall into the pleonastic habit of saying, redundantly: ``BJT transistor.''

BJU
Bob Jones University. The very latest in eighteenth-century educational philosophy. If you didn't already know quite a bit about this school, the name alone might make you suspicious.

(Why does bju.com forward to FriendFinder? Gotta think about this. If you become a member you can search by religion and ethnicity, and these don't have to be the same as yours.)

BK
BalK. Baseball scorecard abbreviation.

B-K
Barkhausen-Kurtz. As in Barkhausen-Kurtz Oscillation and Oscillators.

Bk
Berkelium. Atomic number 97. A transuranide. Learn more at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.

Bk.
BooK.

BK
BooKing. Airline fare abbreviation.

BK
Burger King. I drove up to the order station. ``What's this 99 cent special? Is it like a Whopper?''
``Yeah sorta. It's two burgers with cheese and a special sauce.''
``Well, I don't want the cheese. What's in the special sauce?''
``All I can tell you is, it's like a Big Mac.''
``Can I have it without the special sauce?''

I can't have it without the special sauce. ``Special orders don't upset'' them, but they may just not fill them.

The first Burger King opened in 1955 in Miami as ``Instaburger King.'' Skipping ahead a little bit, a merger of Grand Metropolitan and Guinness in 1997 created Diageo, which inherited BK (still based in Florida). In 2002, BK had 11,500 US stores, second only to McDonald's (over 13,000). London-based Diageo plc put it up for bid in 2002, originally seeking $2.5 billion, but soon had to lower its target to $2.3 billion.

(Turns out that it's rather a fixer-upper. As of 2002, average sales per store had been flat for years at about $1.1 million, while McDonald's was up to $1.6 million. The company went through nine chief executives in 13 years, and from 1996 to 2001, customer visits to BK stores in the US dropped 20%. McDonald's has been expanding internationally, with 50% of revenues coming from non-US sales; BK: 23%.)

On July 25, 2002, Texas Pacific Group (an LBO shop), in cooperation with Boston's Bain Capital Inc. and Goldman Sachs Capital Partners, among others, reached agreement to buy BK from Diageo. The price was $2.26 billion, including $600 million cash. The deal left Burger King's management in place and was expected to lead to more capital for the Florida-based chain. In late July I mentioned this to the woman working the cash register at the BK in the Huddle. Actually, I mentioned it to Gary, but she kibitzed. She was happy to hear that the new owners were in an invest mood and that they didn't plan a lot of store closings. Isn't it great to have committed employees? It's not a business -- it's a community! In fact, it's not just a community -- it's a family! A big family, that needs to put food on the table.

Burger King is also mentioned at the KFC entry.

BKA, b/k/a
Better Known As.

BKD
Backscatter Kikuchi Diffraction.

BKM
Best Known Method.

BKME
Bank of Kuwait and Middle East.

BKO
Beam KnockOut.

[column]

BKT
Berliner Klassikertexte. Full title: Berliner Klassikertexte herausgegeben von der Generalverwaltung der kgl. Museen zu Berlin. `Berlin classical texts published by the general administration of the royal museums at Berlin.'' In Berlin, you got that?! Cf. BGU.

BKV
Budapesti Közlekedési Vállalat. Budapest (Hungary) Transportation Agency.

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