For those who think the capitalization convention in English is a significant psycholingistic fact, here's some more fodder for thought: in a personal letter in German, one capitalizes the familiar second-person pronoun (Du, Dein, Dich, Dir -- `you, your[s], [unto] you, to you'). The familiar du-words in German are cognate with the English thou-words. In English, the familiar forms disappeared from ordinary speech and an undistinguished use of the formal you-forms became standard. Similar things are happening elsewhere. In Spanish as it is spoken throughout North and South America, the familiar plural second-person pronoun (vosotros) and the associated verb conjugations are virtually obsolete. The formal-familiar distinction survives in the singular, but I have heard mothers use the formal form of imperative to their toddlers.
``The Voice of British Biology.''
[Except for this paragraph, this entry dates back to the turn of the century. But not to worry: if anything interesting should ever chance to occur, we'll be sure to mention it here. As of 2006, though, there's been nothing. Sure, Samaranch promoted himself from whatever he was to whatever-he-was emeritus and éminence grise, and the Summer Olympics go to China in 2008. I hear that people will run and jump and so forth, and it's widely expected that some people will run and jump better than some other people will run and jump. The games are no longer of any real interest except to participants and their pharmacists.]
They've been trying for years to tap the advertising revenue potential of the world's largest dictatorship and ``His Excellency'' Mr. Juan Antonio Samaranch (IOC ruler) gave an award for ``protecting the world's youth'' to the scumbag who ordered the tanks to roll on Tian An Mien, but pressure from human rights groups put the year-2000 Olympics in Sydney.
IOC rules prohibit athletes from writing journals during the games. They wouldn't want any competitors distracted by the thought of profit.
In a surprising development, in the year 2000 -- the centennial of the modern Olympics -- the Olympic games were not seen on US television. There were short snippets on the TV news, but NBC had bought the US broadcast rights and refused to allow anyone to see more than a few tantalizing glimpses. Their ``coverage'' consisted of interviews with coaches, inane commentary, human interest stories that weren't, drug scandal opinions, and a hunt for the venue of the next ``Survivor'' TV series.
Unaccountably, prime-time Nielsen ratings for NBC during the Olympics set record lows. I guess the NBC dogs in the Olympics manger are still scratching their heads over that, or whatever part of their anatomy they stuffed their brain into.
Founded in 1874, based in Canada, has a million members in North America. Has a suit going against DLJ that I read about in Barron's, October 4, 1999, so I figured I'd do a couple of financial entries in the glossary.
Barron's sells for US$3.50, just like The New Republic, but TNR sells for CA$3.50 in Canada. This looks like a currency speculation opportunity -- buy TNR in Canada and resell in the US. Oh yeah, oughtta be BIG money in that racket.
IOF likes to refer to itself redundantly as ``IOF Foresters.'' They also point out that they're not involved [directly] in the forestry industry, they're not a secret society with ritual handshakes and passwords [that's what they all say] and they want your business regardless of sex or previous condition of wood-industry employ.
IOMP publishes a biannual newsletter called Medical Physics World (MPW). Some books are published as the Medical Science Series by the publishing arm (IOPP) of the British professional physicists' organization (IOP), and it has two journals -- Physics in Medicine and Biology, and Physiological Measurement.
[At long wavelengths, the electrostatic screening in a metal is due primarily to free electrons, so the screening length is comparable to the average distance between nearest-neighbor conduction electrons (see rs). As frequency increases, the effective screening length increases, so nearby conduction electrons see most of each others' unscreened charge. Hence, the electron gas in an ordinary metal has collective excitations arising from the long-range Coulomb interactions, so in thermodynamic terms it is not in the gaseous state but in the plasma state. The collective excitations are called plasmons.]
In a section of Harper's (July 1994; $2.95) on the proceedings of the annual Illinois State Fair Golden Gloves competition (16-year-olds), D. F. Wallace reported a new ion-based information system (IIS):
... Sullivano gamely rises, but his knees wobble and he won't face the ref. ... Hall shakes his gloves at the ceiling as several girls call his name, and you can feel it in the air's very ions: Darrell Hall is going to get laid before the night's over.
The story of Ion (Apollonides) is told by Euripides in his tragedy Ion. It's not a tragedy in the modern sense -- it has a happy ending. In fact, it was a tragedy because Euripides offered it as such in that year's drama (413BC or so) competition. Even in those years, however, Euripides' Iphegina Taurica, Helena, and Ion were regarded as not exactly tragic tragedies. At least one commentator at the time, and later scholiasts, said such works were not worthy of tragedy, or comedic. In recent times, terms like ``tragi-comedy'' and ``tragic romance'' have been used.
Acronym is COI in various Romance languages spoken in the countries where olives are mostly grown.
Someone should do a study of the utilitarian aspects of misspelling and mispronunciation practices in acronyms (or initialisms, if you want to get precise) and their expansions.
Let no one accuse the Stammtisch of focusing narrowly on its own parochial concerns.
For information on Spanish intellectual property law, see this page of the Ministerio de Cultura.
Can you say ``Law of Mass Action''? Sure you can!
(Okay, okay. Today was April 6, 2003. I thought they were called something quaintly antiquarian over there, like ``Chemysts.'')
This is a very focused glossary; we give you only the essential information. Using these essentials, you are enabled to deduce the necessary contingent.
Matthew Sweet is a rocker.
A scheme has been developed for writing IPA in newsgroup postings. That is, using only seven-bit ASCII characters.
The A&R (Atene & Roma) entry has a bit of information or speculation on theta in the IPA.
Let's see if I understand this: the Magazine Publishers of America represents a membership of companies that is about 25% international, but the International Periodical Distributors Association has no membership outside America that is worth mentioning. I guess the constant here is that one is implicitly discussing the US market, so the international publishers that sell in the US are publishers ``of America.'' On the other hand, from the perspective of the distributors of America, the extraterritorial origin of some of the periodicals makes them (the distributors) international. So happy I could clear that up.
To tell you the truth, I probably wouldn't have mentioned it, but I didn't want the other IPP entry to feel lonely. It's surprising the social skills you have to deploy in order to maintain a successful, happy, single-author glossary. It's like I tell the entries every day before work -- ``You are the glossary!''
Happy now? No?! Oh yeah, it's ``[i]it's as I tell the entries....''
Aren't there any other IPPL entries?
Oh all, right: 128 bits (2128 is about 3.402 823 692 09 × 1038, and now I really do mean ``about'') divided into 8 sixteen-bit segments. This time, the segments will be separated by colons. Since sixteen bits describe a number between 0 and 65535, this could get unwieldy; apparently another part of the plan is to prefer the use of hex notation, so the sixteen bits are each representable by four hexadecimal digits.
Here are some essay links presenting the politically incorrect side (i.e. it's not just nurture, but nature too) of a number of IQ-related issues.
It is common to norm IQ tests to a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15 (``deviation IQ'', WAIS) or 16 (Stanford-Binet) or something else, but even that is nowhere near as straightforward as it sounds.
This seems like as good a place as any to place a link to Test Junkie.
In IAWL, Clarence is described as having the IQ of a rabbit. People all over Bedford Falls are clamoring for help, and this is the guy the heavenly authorities select to go down and answer their prayers. Oh yeah, he's got the faith of a child, too. He's been in heaven for two hundred years and he still needs faith to sustain his belief? Good one.
Guicciardini's ricordo C60 reads, in Domandi's translation,
A superior intellect is bestowed upon men only to make them unhappy and tormented. For it does nothing but produce in them greater turmoil and anxiety than there is in more limited men.
Guicciardini was evidently going by the maxim that a word to the wise is sufficient. Here is an earlier version of this ricordo (B115):
In this world it is undoubtedly true that men of mediocre mind have a better time, a longer life, and are in some respects happier than men of high intellect; for a noble mind is apt to be the cause of trouble and worry. But mediocre men participate more in brute animality than in humanity, whereas the others transcend the human condition and approach the celestial natures.
It's an iqqy-stiqqy situation today. The rock group The B-52's recorded a song called ``Mesopotamia'' once, the title track of an album. Prophetic.
![[column]](images/column.gif){kind=small}
For an ideal (``black body'') emission, the peak wavelength of the emission spectrum is given by Wien's Law (technically, this is one of Wien's two displacement laws, but today one regards his second law as a consequence of his first and the Stefan-Boltzmann Law). Wien's Law states that wavelength at maximum = 2897.8 µm-K/T. At (the standard, rather stuffy value of) room temperature (T = 298 K), this yields a wavelength just under 100 000 Å, compared to a typical optical wavelength in the vicinity of 5000 Å (500 nm).
Metals that don't have a color in the ordinary sense (as copper is red or gold is yellow) can be described as ``gray bodies'' in a technical sense. A gray body is one whose absorptivity or emissivity (they have to be the same in equilibrium) is not unity (as in a black body) but is independent of frequency. A gray body has an emission spectrum that is uniformly scaled down from that of a black body, so the location of the peak is still given by Wien's Law. So a gray body heated to 2500 K has a wavelength distribution peaked in the ``near IR'' with a significant amount of visible radiation mostly in the red. ``Near IR'' usually means wavelengths from about 800 nm to 1400 nm. The color tells the temperature, but little else. A grayish metal heated to 2500 K will have about the same color whether molten (as iron would be, since its melting temperature is 1808 K) or rock-solid (like tungsten, melting point 3687 K). (All this assumes the metal isn't burning; that nonequilibrium process emits light in a spectrum characteristic of the particular oxidation reactions.)
The Sun is a pretty good approximation of a ``black body'' in the technical sense; it only doesn't look black because it's white-hot. Its surface temperature is about 5780 K, which gives a peak wavelength of about 500 nm. If this distribution were sharply peaked, the sun would look green or cyan. In fact, the distribution is fairly flat within the visible range of the light spectrum, so sunlight is white. The Earth's atmosphere, however, preferentially scatters short-wavelength light (by what's called Rayleigh scattering). When we look directly at the Sun, we see white light minus the scattered component, so the sun looks yellow. When we look away from the Sun, we see scattered light, preferentially blue, the ``color of the sky.''
The radiation normally classified as infrared is everything between the visible spectrum (ending at red around 700 nm) and microwaves (1 mm). As that range covers more than three orders of magnitude, it is useful to break it up. Hence the conventional divisions --
- Near IR (NIR): λ < 1.4 μm
- Short-wavelength IR (SWIR): 1.4 μm < λ < 3 μm
- Mid-wavelength IR (MWIR): 3 μm < λ < 8 μm
- Long-wavelength IR (LWIR): 8 μm < λ < 15 μm
- Far IR (FIR): 15 μm < λ < 1000 μm
You're probably wondering, ``well, if that's so, why don't they just call it the IRS''? Three reasons:
- Intergovernmental trademark (TM) agreements.
- On QWERTY keyboards (KB), S is just one fat-finger error from A.
- With the British penchant for seeing irony everywhere, too many taxpayers would notice that ``service'' is a bad joke.
They collect right out to the shore, I believe. A/k/a ``The Revenue.''
The country Europeans used to call some such names as the English ``Persia.'' Strictly speaking, Persia is only a southern province of Iran. ``Persian'' does properly refer to the principal language of Iranians -- Parsi (Farsi). They preserve the distinction in the same way that most Spaniards speak Castilian and preserve the distinction between Español and Castellano.
You know, in English some people say ``Ih ron'' and some people say ``Eye ran,'' but nobody says ``Eye ron.'' This is good, because it would sound too much like iron, an element with isotopes at the top of the curve of nuclear binding energy.
Iran's main exports are oil, gas, and terrorism. It's hard to put a dollar value on the last item because Hezbollah and Iran's secret services have not boarded the financial transparency bandwagon yet. But since Iran mostly sells the first two and buys the last, it probably exports more hydrocarbon fuels than terrorism. If they cut back on terrorism exports, they could afford to spend money on other things, but perhaps there are traditional cultural reasons for maintaining the expense (for a historical perspective, see assassination, political). Iran is also the world's largest exporter of wild sturgeon caviar. I'm just amazed fish still survive in the Caspian.
Learn more at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.
The IRA is generally believed to be funded by charitable contributions from Irish nationalist sympathizers in the US. However, they also have income from mafia-like operations in Northern Ireland and foreign operations like sharing their bomb-making expertise with FARC guerillas.
Technically, the IRA is only the PIRA (provisional same). It puts me in the mind of ``actual, existing socialism'' (communism).
There is something called Sinn Féin (pronounced ``shin FEIGN'') that is typically described as ``the IRA's political wing.'' Sinn Féin and the IRA are, you know, ``in contact'' ... they receive communications from each other, by some mysterious means. Séances, perhaps. So if Irish and British governments negotiate with the political group Sinn Féin, then Sinn Féin might be able to prevail upon the terrorist group (the IRA) to diminish its violence and even eventually to lay down its arms, so long as this can be done in a nonverifiable way. This kind of peace process is known as ``never negotiating with terrorists.''
In 2004, during an extended period of ``qualified cease fire'' observed by an independent monitoring commission (IMC), the government of the Irish Republic was negotiating with Sinn Féin for the IRA (not innocent Sinn Féin, of course) to renounce its ``criminal activities'' (as opposed to its other activities). Then, that December 20, someone staged a carefully planned robbery of Northern Bank, Belfast, taking away 26 million pounds -- one of the largest cash heists in history. The MO -- kidnapping a couple of bank employees and holding their families hostage -- was similar to that used in a series of earlier, less profitable crimes. Irish and Northern Irish police blamed the IRA. Feelings were hurt on many sides, so much so that harsh words were spoken in the aftermath.
In February 2005, after making its own independent investigation, the IMC also concluded that the IRA committed the bank robbery and the series of similar crimes that preceded it. Moreover, the IMC reiterated some claims it had made in its first report, published in April 2004, summarized by these, uh, bullets:
* Some members, including some senior members, of Sinn Féin are also members, including, in some cases, senior members of PIRA.
* Sinn Féin, particularly through its senior members, is in a position to exercise considerable influence on PIRA's major policy decisions, even if it is not in a position actually to determine what policies or operational strategies the PIRA will adopt. We believe that decisions of the republican movement as a whole about these matters lie more with the leadership of PIRA than with Sinn Féin.
* Within the PIRA some decisions follow a process of consultation with the membership initiated by the leadership.
In the usual measured language, the IMC ``note[d that although] Sinn Féin has said it is opposed to criminality of any kind it appears at times to have its own definition of what constitutes a crime.'' Ah -- it's always some little technicality that gets in the way of peace.
As of mid-March 2005, the bank heist and one other event have caused a sea change in public mood. The other event was the vicious murder January 30 of Robert McCartney, father of two. Nothing unusual in the event, but in the aftermath his sisters and girlfriend have mounted a public campaign to get the IRA to lift the intimidation (how do you say omerta in Gaelic?) preventing some 70 witnesses from admitting they saw anything. So effective has their campaign been that the IRA has made them a counter-offer (to execute McCartney's murderers), and other victims' families are beginning to take heart and publicly demand justice. There are even calls for Catholic and Protestant communities to come together against the terror.
Meanwhile, the political side-effects of the bank robbery have continued. The Irish government is saying, in effect, that it chooses to remove the scales from its eyes, and that Sinn Féin is the IRA. Pundits are urging the British government to make the same discovery. I dunno. Anyone who would believe that Sinn Féin is the IRA probably believed that the terrorist group Al Fatah (cofounded by Yasser Arafat) is the same as a liberation organization (the PLO, led by Chairman -- it sounds so sedentary -- Yasser Arafat). This is stupid: they're distinct organizations. One hand is not responsible for what the other is doing.
Well, no, not really. Just a little academic classicist humor.
Medical IRB's review incidents and accidents, and procedures and performance, possibly adjusting the latter to prevent the former from happening again. Post-secondary IRB's just meddle bureaucratically to prevent component divisions of the school from performing their assigned tasks. (E.g., they must approve the administration of any assessment projects by the assessment office, whenever the office wants to solicit data from students. The traditional name for this is ``a bone in your throat.'')
And what's long enough to be intercontinental? The Red Sea separates Asia and Africa -- that's intercontinental, isn't it? No? You want 3500 km? Some say 5000 km?! 5500!!???
In late 1919 the Securities Exchange Company (in spirit the very opposite of the SEC) was founded in Boston. They sold notes redeemable after 90 days for 50% more than the amount invested -- and soon adopted the practice of redeeming them in 45 days instead. If you rolled them over immediately, the compounding should have led to an effective interest rate just above 2,580% per annum.
This was the classic ``pyramid scheme,'' in which previous investors are paid off (if not induced to reinvest) from the capital of new investors. This works as long as unliquidated plus new investments (minus what the scheme organizers skim off the top) grow at the appropriate exponential rate, but eventually the pyramid collapses. The organizers abscond or try to.
Of course, in the better schemes, the organizers give some more-or-less plausible explanation of how the amazing returns are generated. This 1919 scheme was one of the best (or perhaps worst) -- the president of the company was Charles Ponzi, and since that time pyramid schemes have been known as Ponzi schemes. How did Ponzi's company say it was earning all that money? By arbitraging IRC's (the putative subject of this entry). I am grateful to Mark for pointing out the connection and contributing the details (as well as for numerous other improvements to the glossary).
By the time the scheme collapsed 8 months later, the company had taken in $15 million, but its liabilities exceeded its assets by $3 million. One of the things that helped bring it down was that the Postmaster General pointed out that there were not enough IRC's in existence in the world for them to have been telling the truth.
See Ponzi Schemes, Invaders from Mars, & more Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, by Joseph Bulgatz (1992, Harmony, ISBN 0-517-58830-7).
Ponzi schemes are illegal. It seems like there has been a resurgence of them in recent years. One variant is the chain letter (``send $5 to the first five names on this list, add your name at the bottom and send to five friends, ...'') now experiencing new life in email. The amazing thing about this version is that it doesn't even pretend to be anything other than a pyramid scheme.
I saw a picture of Ponzi in an article on a perceived increase in investor suits and complaints to the SEC from victims of investment schemes (this was in the NYTimes, 1999.05.25, first business page). Ponzi looked like Milton Berle.
The other historic scam of 1919 is discussed at the WS entry. Insurance policies involve a kind of investment, and have been used as the basis for Ponzi schemes also. See the MEWA entry for an example. For more bunko scams, see the Brooklyn Bridge entry.
You know, in 2001 I received an email out of the blue from someone claiming to be a middle-level official in the former Zaïre. He had a lot of hard-to-explain money that was burning a hole in his mattress, and he needed my help to get it out of his war-torn country. Oh yeah, he got my name from some trusted common acquaintances. I can imagine that my help would have consisted of providing a bank account through which his money could be laundered, for which I would be handsomely rewarded, but first he would have needed a blank check so he could make the necessary transfers. Gee, it turns out that in fact, this scam often involves travel to far-off destinations (often Nigeria), where you can pay a lot of up-front money (for bribes, sometimes literally to launder money, etc.), with your cut for helping launder the money as the carrot. You've arrived in the country without a proper visa, and when the carrot no longer works, the stick may be literal, or it may be the need to bribe your way back out of the country.
That year (2001) was apparently a big one for this sort of thing, and others have been showered with a variety of generally similar investment opportunities. Don't jump at the first offer; those trusted common acquaintances will keep on selling your name. Not all of the opportunities came from <yahoo.com> mailboxes. There's a <yahoo.co.uk> as well, you know. Joining the bunko brigade recently are smaller free email services like TechEmail (which features ``Spam Detection/Blocking'' -- apparently effective only inbound) and alloymail. Oh, here's a dash of exoticism: an invitation to help launder Nigerian money from an Irish email address (eircom.net). For more heartening news on how business opportunities are dissolving the artificial barriers that separate us, visit the B&W entry.
The reason I was not bilked by this perfectly sensible-sounding transaction is that I am spotlessly honest, and I feared that this very believable scheme might require me to do something possibly slightly ethically questionable. You know what they used to say: ``you can't cheat an honest man.'' They used to say this because they preferred to confess dishonesty than stupidity. Forget 1919; this scam is so ancient it's the criminal equivalent of being held up with an arquebus. For a few links on this version see the 419 entry.
Speaking of ancient, in the 1930's when my father was a teenager in Chile, some guy tried to perpetrate one of the standard scams on him, I forget which. As my father (this is actually before he was my father, of course) ran off, ostensibly home for some money, he visited the police commissary. The bunko artist was well known to the cops, so they took the guy in and beat the him up again. I guess that dishonest marks and police brutality are just unfair misfortunes that you have to average into the costs of an otherwise rewarding line of work.
It all basically comes down to yield: what fraction of potential marks falls for the scam. Data seem to be limited, so you may appreciate this semiquantitative quasireliable news. CNN reported on August 8, 2005, that Nigeria is cracking down on Internet scams. The report begins with some personal color -- a vignette of one Kele B., who has sent out ``tens of thousands'' of emails telling recipients they have won about $6.4 million in a British government ``Internet lottery.''
Kele reports that so far he's had only one response, from an American who paid more than $5000 in ``fees and taxes.'' So a yield below about 0.01% is sufficient return on investment to keep Kele coming to his local Internet cafe. Others are more successful, however. The current crackdown, which started in 2002, recovered cash and assets worth more than $700 million between May 2003 and June 2004, from a mere ``more than 500'' arrested suspects.
This page lists a number of IRC servers and links to other information.
ichat is a netscape plug-in for chats.
IRCPS has in its care in Princeton what they call the Neugebauer Index. It's a microform version (actually microfilm and also fiche) of Otto Neugebauer's 26-thousand-plus file cards, available for research purposes only to scholars and institutions, along with a user's guide and directory.
IRCPS also has an electronic publication called Aestimatio: Critical Reviews in the History of Science. ``Aestimatio provides critical, timely assessments of books published in the history of what was called science from antiquity up to the early modern period in cultures ranging from Spain to India, and from Africa to northern Europe. The aim is to allow reviewers the opportunity to engage critically both the results of research in the history of science and how these results are obtained.''
``The International Republican Institute ... was founded in 1983, as a nonprofit nonpartisan organization dedicated to advancing democracy, freedom, self-government and the rule of law worldwide. IRI programs are nonpartisan and adhere to the fundamental American principles of individual freedom, equal opportunity and the entrepreneurial spirit that fosters economic development.IRI was founded after President Ronald Reagan's 1982 speech before the British Parliament in Westminster in which he proposed a broad objective of helping countries build the infrastructure of democracy. Quoting the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, he stated `we must be staunch in our conviction that freedom is not the sole prerogative of a lucky few but the inalienable and universal right of all human beings.'
The Westminster speech led to the establishment of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) by Congress in 1983. The NED is a mechanism that channels congressional funds [``congressional''? so it's not ultimately coming out of my pocket?] to the four institutes: The International Republican Institute (IRI), the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI), the Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE), and the American Center for International Labor Solidarity (ACILS). These organizations are uniquely qualified to provide technical assistance to aspiring democrats worldwide.''
I notice also that the names associated with the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs are Democratic-party names. It appears that the IRI and NDI, whatever legitimately nonpartisan and arguably beneficial work they may be doing, are a bipartisan boondoggle.
I'm back, but I haven't found out yet. I just wanted to let you know that I haven't forgotten, completely. Don't give up hope, sucker.
After visiting this glossary many years ago, my friend Steve commented that it was just like me, but concentrated. So IRL I'm like, diluted.
In Spanish, persona física is literally `physical person'; the term persona natural is equivalent. The terms are used in Roman law to distinguish a human from an artificial legal entity like a corporation, partnership, or estate. Any of the latter is called a persona jurídica. Other terms include persona moral (a translation of the Latin corpus morale) and various terms in legal theory that are generally less common (e.g., personal ideal). These are not entirely equivalent, but the distinctions are out of my bailiwick.
Great icon.
Since the use of punctuation in initialisms has declined and can now seem old-fashioned, it is natural that the punctuated form (I.R.T.) has come to be used exclusively for the original private company, in contradistinction to the IRT lines within the current publicly operated subway system.