B b

No wait -- don't tell me: ``people who stutter'' is respectful and recognizes the personhood of people who stutter, whereas ``stutterers'' is essentializing, derogatory, and offensive. (And somewhat onomatopoeic.) When all the professional offense-takers are done with the language, it'll be three times wordier and more opaque. It'll take longer to speak that speak than to stutter the language as it is now.

It's been almost seventy years, so I guess the story can be told. When my dad was a young man, the family was still in contact with relatives in Alsace-Lorraine. It was the run-up to WWII, and a lot of these relatives realized they were in a bad place and needed to get out. Of course, it was the middle of a world-wide depression and immigration visas were scarce. Many countries that were willing to take immigrants would only accept them to fill perceived labor or skill shortages. So a rich cousin of ours bought a farm and brought over a number of the mishpoche on the pretext that they were trained agronomists or something. My dad was fluent in French, so he was employed to teach the newcomers the local langauge (Spanish). He had variable success with this, and apparently the government was in a hurry for the newcomers to demonstrate that they were Spanish-speaking. So one other thing that my dad taught was how to stutter. You can learn to stutter faster than you can learn any language. When you stutter it's hard for others to tell that you can't speak the language because you don't know it well, rather than because you can't get it out. And people complete your sentences for you with the answers they want, as for example on naturalization papers.

More on stuttering and the New World emigration at the Abend entry.

The Bcc: field in email is an optional header that functions like the Cc: field -- it instructs the MTA to send a copy of the message to any addresses listed after the field name. It differs from the Cc: header in that the Bcc: line does not appear in the email received.

The similar-sounding initialism ``BCBDS'' seems to be widely used as an equivalent of BCDBS.

On January 4, 2004, I googled around trying to figure out what was going on. Here are the hit counts I got with various searches:

The words in the expansion: 3220
The expansion: 193
"BCBDS": 95
"BCDBS": 108
"BCBDS" and the expansion (as phrase): 56
"BCBDS" and the expansion words: 56
"BCBDS" and "Broadband" and "Service": 57
"BCDBS" and the expansion (as phrase): 51
"BCBDS" and the expansion words: 81
"BCDBS" and the expansion words: 83
"BCDBS" and "BCBDS" and the expansion: 39
"BCDBS" and "BCBDS" and "VERA" and the expansion: 36
("BCDBS" or "BCBDS") and "bearer of data": 0

As of March 2005, it has only five regional member states (miembros regionales) (Belize, the former British Honduras, and Panama are the nonmember C.A. countries). In addition it has five miembros extraregionales: Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, the Republic of China, and Spain.

Wait a sec: Spain!? That's not just extraregional -- that's practically on the other side of the world!

No, that isn't it either. This is really beginning to bother me. Maybe they did away with it. In ANSI C, they dropped bcmp for memcmp().

Even more surprising, perhaps, is that you can download a machine-independent interpreted version of BCPL, implemented in C, made available by Richard Martin in 2000. A copy of the BCPL manual from July 1967 (which also constituted the language definition) is available on-line (different typescript with almost identical content here). The abstract:

BCPL is a simple recursive programming language designed for compiler writing and system programming: it was derived from true CPL (Combined Programming Language) by removing those features of the full language which make compilation difficult namely, the type and mode matching rules and the variety of definition structures with their associated scope rules.

From Section 4.2, on string constants:

     The string character alphabet contains all the
characters except * and ' are represented directly. These two
exceptions are represented by

     **  and *' respectively.
In addition
     *n represents    newline
     *s     "         space
     *b     "         backspace
     *t     "         tab

It's interesting that nested blocks in BCPL (called sections), opened with multiple $( (called SECTBRA) tokens, could be closed by a single SECTKET $). This doesn't seem like a convenience to me. In later versions, the {,} tokens were adopted, and curly brackets have been the standard code-block tokens ever since. A little bit about the history of comment styles in BCPL and its successors B, C, C++, and C# can be found at the B entry.

Michael Neumann's extensive list of sample short programs in different programming languages includes a Hello World program in BCPL.

The Net Advance of Physics site has one (as of 95/08) paper directly on the theory.

In 2005, for only the first time since 2003, Congress looked into the fairness of the BCS. Finally our legislators were getting off their duffs and getting to work on pressing issues! ``College football is not just an exhilarating sport, but a billion-dollar business that Congress cannot ignore,'' said Joe Barton (R-TX), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee. Barton feared that the method for determining who's number 1 was flawed. Coincidentally, the Texas Longhorns were ranked #2 (behind USC) in most polls for virtually all of the 2005 season. (They were #1 in the BCS rankings for week 9, the second week that BCS rankings were available, due to higher computer ranking. In 2005, the score that determined BCS rankings was a simple average of the Harris Interactive poll, the USA Today Coaches poll, and a strange number called the Computer poll.) Barton represents Texas legislative district #6, which is nowhere near the Longhorns' Austin home, and he's an Aggie, so obviously the hearings represent his disinterested concern, and not demagogic pandering or Texas pique.

People complain about unfairness as if fairness were possible. The BCS is just a prominent example of the failure of the assumption.

George Harrison had a song called Bangladesh, and he made four syllables out of the name (BANG-uh-luh-DESH). What more do you need to know?

Cf. B.D.

Cf. BD

BDD's are one tool to analyze fault trees. See R. Sinnamon and J. Andreas: ``Fault Tree Analysis and Binary Decision Diagrams,'' Proceedings of the Reliability and Maintainability Symposium, pp. 215-222 (January 1996).

In the 1953 movie ``The Titfield Thunderbolt,'' there's a scene in a pub where Mrs. Valentine (so IMDb) asks her husband ``Do you know what time it is?'' He replies ``Yes, my love: summer double time.''

Another sweet thing that is bad for you is lead acetate, once also known as ``sugar of lead.'' (Just say ``no thanks, I'd rather have some cyclamate.'') The Romans used it as an artificial sweetener (and as a whitener in face creams, too!). It's hard to tell at this remove just how much lead poisoning it caused. Other associations of sweetness and bad health: schizophrenics and diabetics often smell sweet, though ironically, schizophrenics may have delusions that they are giving off noxious fumes. Okay, I agree: it might not be delusional.

Beryllium is the p-dopant of choice for GaAs semiconductor. Arsenic (As) ain't any too good for you either. Chemicals! Can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em! No wonder so many personals ads mention ``chemistry.''

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

Be is the lightest alkaline earth element, if it's considered an alkaline earth element at all.

One of the weirder Latin words is zmaragdum for `emerald.' It occurs in Petronius. Don't believe me? Look here.

Belgium is also known for unusual vegetables (Belgian endive and Brussels sprouts).

If you have time to kill, you could visit the dialect entry now.

Also in 1996, the Belgian government pioneered a new public relations technique for getting scandals of government officials involved in corruption off the front pages: trump them with scandals of government officials involved in child sexual molestation and murder! A front page can only hold so much.

Rec.Travel offers some links.

You observe that ``Flanders'' is not exactly the same as the region traditionally identified as Vlaanderen. You want to nitpick, go argue with this map.

Ariadne, ``The European and Mediterranean link resource for Research, Science and Culture,'' has a page of national links.

I should point out that that Welsh/Walloon joke is made possible by a common Germanic root *walh, meaning `foreign' (effectively `Celt-or-Roman'). The root occurs in the word walnut, probably of Low-German origin, which refers to the nut found in Gaul and Italy (as opposed to the hazelnut found in German areas). The root appears in the word Walloon, used by speakers of Old Low Franconian or Old Dutch (another Low-German language) in northeastern Gaul to describe their Celtic (Gaulish) neighbors. In Britain, the Low-German languages also preserved a reflex of *walh. (What we know best is West Saxon, which became normative in writing and is our idea of ``Old English.'' In this Old English, wealh meant `foreign.') Speakers of Celtic anywhere in Britain were called by the words that evolved into Welsh and Welshman. (This included, for example, an enclave in Strathclyde that persisted well into the Middle Ages.) Eventually, the term became specialized to Celtic speakers in the Western enclave that came to be called Wales.

This etymology has a certain bitter irony for the Welsh, as the Germans were -- from a territorial perspective -- the original foreigners who usurped their hosts. That's ``original'' only so far back as we can tell, of course, but at least it can be said that inhabitants of the area (the ``Britons'' in the original sense of that word) spoke Indo-European languages of the Celtic subfamily before local inhabitants spoke IE languages of the Germanic family.) The critical fact is that, as the Roman empire collapsed in the mid- to late fifth century, it became unable to protect its periphery. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles (written some centuries afterwards) the Romanized Celts in present-day southern England hired Germanic what-you-might-call Gastarbeiter to protect them from their own marauding (Celtic) kin to the North; the Germanic mercenaries found easy pickin's and ended up taking over. The situation bears some similarities to the situation simultaneously playing out in southern Europe, where Roman emperors tried to enlist Germanic tribes en masse to protect the Empire. The names Cornwall, Walsh, and Wallace (and Wallis, I suppose) stem from the same root, adding further color to the story of Edward VIII, erstwhile Prince of Wales (who gave up his throne to marry Wallis Simpson). The dignity of ``Prince of Wales'' is a story in itself, but it is a relative recent invention (1348). The coat of arms of the Prince of Wales bears the motto Ich dien. `I serve' in Modern German is ich diene; dropping the final e is colloquial throughout Germany, and standard in some local varieties. One of the more amusing (and probably proportionately less plausible) stories about the origin has it that King Edward had promised the Welsh a prince who could speak not a word of English. When the prince was born, his father held him up and said, in Welsh: ``eich dyn'' (`your man').

There was an Old Norse reflex of the *walh: valir, meaning `Gauls, Frenchmen.' The Germanic word was adopted in Slavic languages and used to describe Latin- or Romance-speaking groups in south-eastern Europe, whose precise ethnicity continues to be in dispute (typical situation in the Balkans). It is well not to rely too much on etymology for information on a named group's origins. A famous cautionary example is Gypsy, a name applied on the misunderstanding that Gypsies were from Egypt.

Many years ago the TV show ``60 Minutes'' followed a group of tourists on a package tour of Europe. This led to a movie, a 1969 comedy about Americans on a bus tour of Europe, called If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium. (It was rehashed as an inferior TV movie in 1987. The title If It's Tuesday, It Still Must Be Belgium gives you an idea of how much thought and originality went into that.)

In Fielding's Guide to Europe (Sloane, 1963), Henry Fielding wrote

As a member of an escorted tour, you don't even have to know the Matterhorn isn't a tuba.

(It's an Alp, if Alps has a singular, and it's not in Belgium.) Oh wait -- the Fielding's Guides were by Temple Fielding, not Henry. Too bad.

On Christmas Eve 2002, Scott Peterson of Modesto, California, reported the disappearance of his pregnant wife Laci Peterson. Over the next month, rumors began to circulate that he had been involved in an affair. On January 24, at a hastily arranged press conference, a woman named Amber Frey announced that she had met him the previous November 20, and that they began an affair after Scott Peterson, ahem, made a false statement about his marital status. (This was made explicit. I'm slightly surprised that it came up explicitly in the circumstances. I mean, if a woman thinks a man might be cheating on his wife, what does she suppose the conditional odds are, of his reporting his marital status accurately? Maybe she asked if he was separated.) Amber Frey had approached Modesto police shortly after the disappearance became news, and subsequent phone conversations she had with him were recorded. In April, Laci's body and that of her fetus were found in the East Bay, and Scott Peterson was charged with their murder. At his trial in 2004, the recorded conversations with Frey were played back.

In those conversations, Peterson claimed he was in Brussels, Belgium, on a business trip. A wholesale fertilizer salesman, Peterson really laid it on thick, inventing an assortment of entertaining details to support and fill out the basic lie. Among other things, he commented that Europeans work ten hours a day.

Incidentally, if you are planning to travel internationally, you need to be aware that Scott's phone would have been no good in Belgium. More to the point, US and Canadian cell phones don't work with the cell system in most of the rest of the world, including Europe. Short-term cell-phone rentals are now widely available on a variety of plans. Check before you go: you can probably get a better deal than at your destination airport. If you're coming to the US from Europe, you may find it more difficult. I used to rent a cell phone at the car rental agency when I visited Los Angeles, but some time between August 2002 and September 2003, the company that used to provide that service through the car rental agencies got out of the business. If this weren't the Belgium entry I'd probably try to track down more of the details.

This is probably a good place to mention the special status of San Francisco. Many counties in the state of California share a name with a city they contain. (San Diego and Los Angeles Counties, for example, contain the cities of San Diego and Los Angeles, respectively. It would be more interesting the other way around.) The city of San Francisco, by contrast, is a county. Berlin's status reminded me of that. See the entry HB (for Bremen) for a situation similar to, and in some respects even more extreme than, that of Berlin.

Berlin was split into four sectors of occupation at the end of WWII, a sort of microcosm of Germany as a whole. Violating a previous agreement with the other Allies, the Soviets formed a separate government for their sector, ``East Berlin,'' on Nov. 30, 1948. (There was also a blockade of West Berlin at that time.) As the Soviets turned their zone of occupation into East Germany (the so-called Democratic Republic, GDR), East Berlin became its capital in 1949. West Berlin, formally under continued Allied control until 1990, became a showcase for the West and a major escape route for East Germans. One of the periodic revolts against the Soviet occupation of eastern Europe was a 1953 strike in East Berlin that was put down by Soviet military force on June 17. Hmmm -- 1953. Wasn't that the year Stalin died? A growing hemorrhage of population to the West via Berlin was eventually stanched by the East Germans (under Ulbricht) under the Soviets (under Khrushchev) with the building of the infamous Berlin Wall, starting August 13, 1961 (the border was sealed off on that day; a more permanent structure was erected subsequently). Hmmm -- August 1961... the Kennedy administration was about half a year old then. The Wall was accompanied by a blockade of West Berlin, met by a Western airlift (some relevant information at Evita entry). The destruction of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was the landmark event of the collapse of the Soviet empire. During the Cold War, West Germany's capital was Bonn; the Federal Republic moved its capital back to Berlin in 1999.

Berliners have a reputation within Germany for sophistication and rudeness, somewhat like the reputation of New Yorkers in the US and bonaerenses in Argentina. Back before Tokyo was capital of Japan, back when it was called Edo, the inhabitants of that city had a similar reputation among Japanese. The rudeness of Edo people, and their tricking of poor rubes from the sticks, are common themes in Kabuki characterization and plots. (For a related topic, see the Brooklyn Bridge entry.)

Berlin's total area now is 890.77 sq. km. The population of West Berlin in the 1987 national census was 2,013,000. The population of the united city on Dec. 31, 1997 was 3,425,759. This might be a good place to mention that demographers consider 1% accuracy excellent for large population surveys, and unattainable at the national level.

The ASCII map below was posted by Mark Brader in 1995 to the newsgroups rec.railroad (as it then was) and <misc.transport.urban-transit>. It's a scale diagram showing how the rapid transit system in Berlin was affected by the division of the city. The commuter/suburban services called the S-Bahn, not then numbered, fed onto three lines known as the Ringbahn, Stadtbahn (`city road'), and Nord-Süd Bahn (North-South [rail]road), labelled RB, SB, and NSB on the diagram. The Ringbahn, or as much of it as fits into an 80-column line, forms the boundary of the diagrammed area. Subway (U-Bahn) lines were lettered A to E. As the diagram shows, some routes were forked.

                            [D]      #
                   _,--------*--------------*,
                ,-'    ,o---' `o     #      | `--,_
    RB     _,--*_     | NSB    \    ###     o      `o
     __,--'     C`o ##|#      ##|####      /         `-,_
_o--'        ######\# |#    ### o        A |             `,
           ###      `o\### ##   |          |               `o
           #          `*.###     \         |                 `,
           ##           \`-,      o        o                   `,
            ##           |  \NSB  |       /                      `,
             #           o   |     \     |                     RB  `,
           o-,_        C |   o      o    o                           `o
          /  ##`-,       |  /        \   |                             `,
  SB     /    ### `-,    | /   _,-o-, \  |[E]                            `-o
-o------'       ##   `---*'---'  SB  `-`-*--,_                             |
                ##      /|               |\\  `o-,_                         \
               ##,-o---' |               | \\       --o                      |
               #/ NSB    o               o  \\          ---___               |
               #|        |   ,o, A      /    o\_ SB           o---__o_  E    |
               #| _,-o---*--'   `--o___o'  ,'   `-_                   ---o-___*
               #*'       |                 o       --_                        |
               /#\#######|#########      _- D         `-o_                    |
            A /   `,     o        ####  /        ####     `-,_                |
     B        |    o     | C         ##/##  ######  #####     `--, [B]        /
`*----o-,    /    /      |            o  ####           #####    ,*--___SB   /
/ `-,_   `,_*,__x'       |            `-,                   ####/##     `---*
  A   `o,__/  ,/ `--o----*,____    B     `-,                o--'  ##       /
           ,-'/        _/      `--o---------*-----o--------'       #      /
         ,o  /        *                      \                  ####    ,'
   NSB ,'  o'        / \,_  C                |                ###      /
      /  ,'         |     `o-,___            o              ###       o
  _,-' _/ NSB       o            `--o_       |            ###     RB /
-'    /            /                  `---,_ |           ##         /
__   /             |                        `*_           ###      /
  \ /              o                         | \            ###   /
   *     RB        |                         |  `o            ###/
 _/ `---,__       /                          o    \            _/###
/          `-----*,___                       |     o          /    ###
              [C]     `-,                    o     |         /
                         `,                 [D]    | C      /
                           `,_    RB               |     __/
                              `--------------o-----*----'

A * on the diagram indicates an interchange station; x shows that the lines cross without an interchange. Other stations are marked o, and letters in brackets (e.g., [C]) indicate line or branch termini of the corresponding lines.

The line of # signs snaking across the diagram is, of course, the the border between East and West Berlin -- formally, between the Soviet occupation zone and the jointly administered US-British-French zone. Note that it was crossed by 7 of the 8 railway lines just enumerated, in 11 places altogether: the Ringbahn, Nord-Süd-Bahn, and U-Bahn Lines C and D all crossed it twice, while the Stadtbahn and U-Bahn Lines A and B each crossed it once. Of course, the border actually formed a complete loop around West Berlin; this is just the city-center part of it.

When the border was closed and the Wall erected along it, only 4 of the 11 crossings were actually closed: those of Line A, Line B, and the Ringbahn. Line A and the Ringbahn were split into separate East and West Berlin routes, while the eastern end of Line B was simply closed, breaking the interchange with the Stadtbahn. The eastern end of the West Berlin part of Line A later closed due to lack of traffic in this form. Apparently, the West Berlin part of the Ringbahn also eventually closed. (This was presumably related to the fact that West Berliners were encouraged to boycott the S-Bahn, which was part of the East German railway system.)

On the other three lines crossing the border, almost all of the stations in East Berlin were closed. At the remaining "ghost stations," the trains carrying West Berliners went through without stopping, like express trains.

At Friedrichstrasse station, however, a special arrangement was made. That station became a customs and immigration checkpoint. At an international airport today, you can often arrive from one foreign country, change planes, and depart for a third country without needing to clear customs. Similarly at Friedrichstrasse, people could arrive from West Berlin, change trains, and depart for West Berlin on another route (after patronizing the duty-free shops, if they wished). Apparently, passengers could change between not only Line C and the Nord-Süd-Bahn, but also the Stadtbahn through West Berlin; the latter line was split for S-Bahn purposes into East and West Berlin parts, not at the Wall, but at Friedrichstrasse. (Each of its branches reaching beyond West Berlin to the west was split again at the border.)

Apparently all of the U-Bahn routes through the city center are open again today. In this area, Lines A through E are now called Lines U2, U1, U6, U8, and U5, respectively; except that the eastern branch of Line C has been transferred to a separate line, U7.

We have another Berlin entry on this web page.

Bose-Einstein statistics were invented by Bose, who didn't understand ordinary classical statistics well enough to realize that he wasn't applying statistical principles in an orthodox way. (A full discussion of this point can probably be found in Bram Pais's Subtle Is the Lord : The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein. He described the events surrounding the introduction of Bose statistics at the Princeton Physics Dept. colloquium in 1979 or 1980.) Bose's paper was turned down by a British journal, Proceedings of the Royal Society, I think, and he sent the paper to Einstein asking if he would translate it and submit it to a German journal. Einstein refused to translate the next paper Bose sent him.

Do not confuse this with CIROBE, or with open-air free-admission Chicago Book Fair on Printer's Row, held to coincide with the final two days of the BEA.

For more on pavement, see the like and, like, the John Loudon McAdam eponym entries.

Joan Rivers, for what it's worth (FWIW), thinks that cellar door is the most beautiful-sounding word in the English language, if it's pronounced as one word. Close, anyway. (This datum is tenderly preserved for posterity in Lewis Burke Frumkes: The Logophile's Orgy, (NY: Delacorte Pr., 1995). The claim that cellar door is the most beautiful phrase in the English language has been variously attributed. It's been assigned to Edgar Allan Poe, with his reason being given as that it's a pun on c'est l'adore. It's also been attributed to J.R.R. Tolkien. The latter has, in fact, a very solid claim, although the assertion recorded is a bit weaker than ``most beautiful.'' He mentioned it when he gave the inaugural Charles James O'Donnell lecture in October 1955. Some of those lectures, including Tolkien's, were published in Angles and Britons (Cardiff: Univ. of Wales Pr., 1963). His transcript of his talk includes the following:

   The basic pleasure in the phonetic elements of a language and in the style of their patterns, and then in a higher dimension, pleasure in the association of these word-forms with meanings, is of fundamental importance. This pleasure is quite distinct from the practical knowledge of a language, and not the same as an analytic understanding of its structure. It is simpler, deeper-rooted, and yet more immediate than the enjoyment of literature. Though it may be allied to some of the elements in the appreciation of verse, it does not need any poets, other than the nameless artists who composed the language. It can be strongly felt in the simple contemplation of a vocabulary, or even in a string of names. [pp. 35-6]

   Most English-speaking people, for instance, will admit that cellar door is 'beautiful', especially if dissociated from its sense (and from its spelling). More beautiful than, say, sky, and far more beautiful than beautiful. Well then, in Welsh for me cellar doors are extraordinarily frequent, and moving to the higher dimension, the words in which there is pleasure in the contemplation of the association of form and sense are abundant.

I understand there's something on the cellar-door controversy in Humphrey Carpenter's Tolkien: A Biography (p. 56), but I haven't had a chance to check.

In 2004, an organization calling itself the British Council apparently decided that, instead of coming up with a usefully descriptive name for itself, it would get some free publicity by conducting and reporting a very stupid study. So, to celebrate their 70th anniversary (nothing like a round number to build excitement), they surveyed over 40,000 ``non-English speakers'' (this may have been a more accurate term than you'd think yet) in 102 countries, and compiled the 70 most beautiful words. At least 71 words, in fact, since ``hen night'' took 70th place. Oh, ``hen night,'' sure. But ``oi'' took 61st place, nosing out ``hiccup'' at 63rd. Right now I'm thinking that one of the most beautiful words for the survey team to learn would have been ``methodology.'' It has a nice rhythm and it's useful, too. Were survey participants asked to write their choices? Was it multiple-choice? Here are the top ten:

1. mother
2. passion
3. smile
4. love
5. eternity
6. fantastic
7. destiny
8. freedom
9. liberty
10. tranquillity

The mindless BBC puff piece on this ``news'' gave Michael Quinion a free plug for his ``recent book Port Out, Starboard Home'' about oddities of the English language. (Gee, a whole book of them!) Quinion commented, ``Oi is not a word that I would've thought turned up in English manuals all that often.'' Chris Wade, director of communications at The British Council (oh -- the British one; got it), remarked generally that the list had ``words denoting concepts that people aspire to, like freedom; words that sounded fun like peekaboo and others that aren't really words at all but they [sic] convey real meaning, like oi.''

FWIW, oi is in the SOWPODS dictionary of Scrabble words, widely used outside of North America, but not in the TWL98 (official dictionary for tournament play in North America). The word was not in the third edition of the Official SCRABBLE Players' Dictionary (standard in North American non-tournament play). The fourth edition incorporated a number of words that were in SOWPODS dictionary, and this appears to be one of them: oi is listed as an interjection equivalent to oy.

Clerk: Hello -- how may I help you?
Customer: I'd like to buy eight units please.
Clerk: Oh, but you're at least a three! You don't need any more than seven units.
Customer: Is that how it works? In that case I'll just take five units. You're right -- I'm a 2.9 according to 700 hits on HotOrNot.com. I just want to go up to about eight. Any higher and I'd have to get a different spouse -- you know how much trouble that can be.
Clerk: Of course.
Customer: Now, I weighed myself this morning and---
Clerk: --oh, that isn't necessary. You should go to Fitting to have your surface area measured. You know, beauty is only skin deep.

Just a word of advice: I am the person who wrote this entry, and when I came back and read it again years later, I found it utterly confusing on the first read. Try again.

Bose-Einstein condensation is an odd feature that Einstein realized occurs in certain boson gases. Essentially, it is that a finite fraction of the particles are in the single-particle ground state of the system.

Long version: A gas of bosons -- that is, a system of weakly-interacting (equiv.: ``quasi-free'') bosons -- has statistical properties determined jointly by the density of states (DOS), the chemical potential (μ) and the temperature. The density of states is an energy-dependent function that represents the single-particle quantum states available to be occupied by the bosons. Strictly speaking, for any macroscopic system the DOS is really a very jagged function: an infinite sequence of degeneracy-weighted delta functions. For any macroscopic system, however, the spacing between delta functions is microscopic, and in particular very small compared to the temperature. (You can understand this by measuring temperature in the natural energy units, or by reading ``Boltzmann constant times temperature'' wherever I write ``temperature.'')

Most of the interesting gas properties are expressible as few-particle expectation values. That is, as sums of all expressed as sums over states (and sums over pairs of states for two-particle functions, etc.) weighted by the associated B-E occupation numbers, and some other factors. This sum is equivalent to an integral over the DOS (a multiple integral for multi-particle expectation values). The thing that often makes the calculation tractable in this form is a kind of thermodynamic limit: the DOS is computed as a scaled version of its limit for infinite system size. This often yields a simple smooth function that is easy to to integrate over. Because the B-E distribution varies smoothly on a scale of temperature, the jagged structure of the true DOS washes out anyway, so the error from using the thermodynamic limit is negligible.

The bosons described by the B-E distribution may be conserved (like atoms) or not conserved (like photons or phonons). In either case, the chemical potential is determined self-consistently by the requirement to satisfy whatever are the constraints or boundary conditions determining the number of bosons. For example, in the case of photons, the temperature determines the energy density, and that determines the density of photons and the chemical potential (zero, for the usual situation). For composite bosons, there are usually a variety of conservation laws fixing the number of particles in a closed system. The number of particles is a single-particle expectation value of the sort described above. (In particular, it is a sum over all states of the probable occupancy of those states.)

Now we are ready to understand Bose-Einstein condensation. As the temperature decreases, the B-E distribution sharpens, falling more rapidly at energies above the chemical potential. For a fixed number of particles, this means that the chemical potential must increase to lie just below the minimum-energy state (i.e., just below the region of support of the DOS). With decreasing temperature, the distance to the minimum-energy state eventually becomes comparable to the interlevel spacing -- that is, comparable to the energy scale of the jaggedness of the real DOS. At that point, the smooth approximations associated with the thermodynamic-limit-smooth DOS fail. The fraction of particles in the ground state becomes a macroscopic fraction of the total.

They got a lot of media attention when George P. Shultz, who became Bechtel vice-chairman after a stint in the Nixon administration, replaced Al Haig as Ronald Reagan's Secretary of State in June 1982. George has the kind of quiet confidence that is a real asset if screwing up is unavoidable anyway -- a kind of refined fatuity, worn lightly. He just published a book. He was trained as an economist.

SIZE NAME	LENGTH	WIDTH	NOMINAL HYPOTENUSE	PYTHAGOREAN TRIPLE?
Crib	52"	28"	59.1"	NO.
Twin	75"	39"	84.5"	NO.
Long Twin	80"	39"	89"	YES!
Double or Full	75"	54"	92.4"	NO.
Queen	80"	60"	100"	YES!
King (Std.)	80"	76"	110.3"	NO.
King (Calif.)	84"	72"	110.6"	NO.
King (Eastern)	80"	78"	111.7"	NO.

The BBC has taken advantage, I guess you might say, of its extra name, creating an internet shopping site at the domain <beeb.com>. This is the same government outfit that once upon a time forced the Kinks to sing ``taste is like Cherry Cola'' instead of ``taste is like Coca Cola,'' because of their fastidious distaste for commercialism. Those were the days, my friend. We thought they'd never end.

The Benny Goodman Orchestra (how's that for a graceful transition, eh?) used the bandleader's initials as a logo on instruments, stands, etc. They weren't in a consistent style. (The B and G were generally in the same font style in any single logo, but different logos used various different font styles, the letters sometimes vertically offset and sometimes not.)

Lulu had a role in, and sang the theme song of, the 1967 movie ``To Sir, With Love.'' That movie was socially progressive: a black man (actor Sidney Poitier) was put in the role of a mature, highly educated authority figure, educating and reforming poorly socialized ignorant white youths. Benny Goodman was also progressive in relation to race relations. He was one of the first major bandleaders to have white and black players together in the same band.

Daisy -- Mrs. Tom Buchanan -- Nick's second cousin once removed, confides to him early in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.

``You see I think everything's terrible anyhow,'' she went on in a convinced way. ``Everybody thinks so--the most advanced people. And I know. I've been everywhere and seen everything and done everything.'' Her eyes flashed around her in a defiant way, rather like Tom's, and she laughed with thrilling scorn. ``Sophisticated--God, I'm sophisticated.''

The instant her voice broke off, ceasing to compel my attention, my belief, I felt the basic insincerity of what she had said. ... I waited, and sure enough, in a moment she looked at me with an absolute smirk on her lovely face, as if she had asserted her membership in a rather distinguished secret society to which she and Tom belonged.''

I hear that they drink beer in Australia too.

Here's a comparison of beer and cucumbers archived from the rec.humor.funny newsgroup.

FWIW, Donald Glaser got the idea for bubble chambers (devices used for viewing the trajectories of subatomic particles) while staring at his beer one day in 1952. Eight years later, this invention won him a Nobel prize in physics. Cheers!

Now, I don't mean to disparage football players by this. Indeed, many football players exceed the maximum intelligence cut-off of the Sociology Department. They are admitted only on a provisional basis, and required to take extra practice without a helmet.

Frankly, it's a useful word, if only for constructing crossword puzzles. The OED, s.v. beef, n., seems to prefer it to refer primarily to oxen, but it allows that in the US it refers to [bovine] cattle. I'll take it! This is a word I've needed. (Further, the OED gives beeves as the standard plural; the only twentieth-century variant it recognizes is ``(in U.S.) beefs,'' although one cited quote with that plural form seems to issue from England.) Now all we need is to back-construct a new singular beeve, so beef can be just the uncountable meat again.

The two women met when O'Connor was finishing up a fellowship at Yaddo, the famous artists' community in New York. O'Connor needed a quiet place to stay as she worked on her first novel, Wise Blood. Sally Fitzgerald and her husband, active in New York literary circles, rented her a room over their garage in rural Ridgefield, Conn. For a year and a half, O'Connor became a part of the Fitzgerald household and family; she was godmother to one of the Fitzgerald's six children. Afterwards O'Connor and Sally Fitzgerald continued their friendship by mail (some of the correspondence is in Habit of Being).

O'Connor left the Fitzgeralds' and returned home to Georgia in December 1950 when she became ill. She was hospitalized with lupus, nearly dying then (at age 25) and completely dying at age 39. Lupus is an autoimmune disorder -- the body attacks itself. The suicide disease of choice among writers is alcoholism, but O'Connor was an original.

Sally's husband, the poet and classical scholar Robert Fitzgerald, is well-known today for his translations of Homer. In 1969, they co-edited Flannery O'Connor: Mystery and Manners, a collection of O'Connor's essays and lectures.

Sally Fitzgerald received the offer from publisher Robert Giroux to compile O'Connor's letters at a time when her husband, by then a widely admired Harvard professor of classics, had left her for a younger woman. Before we leave O'Connor altogether, let me mention that she wrote a short story called ``Everything That Rises Must Converge.'' It's not about physics or math.

In Milan Kundera's Laughable Loves, the lothario of the first story seduces an unlikely young woman with his friend's copy of a book entitled, uh, The Golden Apple of Eternal Desire, maybe. Have to check.

Milan Kundera's novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being is about a man who is extremely popular with women. Of course, in principle it's probably about a lot of other deeper, eternal matters, with allegory and irony and veiled criticism of the regime and all that, but all he has to do is snap his fingers. Cf. adult education.

Richard Gwyn, a silly old journalist, wrote the book version of a speech he'd given in 1994 and entitled it Nationalism without Walls: The Unbearable Lightness of Being Canadian (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1995). The entire title is filched, but at least he's up-front about it. Page 7: ``Inevitably, Canadians possess a far lighter sense of national identity than citizens of ethnic nations, Ireland, Poland, Thailand, whatever. At some point, the lightness of identity may become unbearable, as in the title of Milan Kundera's novel, and we'll let it slip away, scarcely noticing that it's gone.''

In Czech, the title of Milan Kudera's novel is Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí. The verb nest means `bear, carry,' and the preformative ess yields snest, `bear with, endure.' The ne is a negating prefix. As an aside, I might point out that Ludwik Zamenhof, known to the world as Doktoro Esperanto, observed that negation in SAE languages is usually indicated by a prefix, and that suffixes are usually used to mark other distinctions. Not that he was the first to notice this, but he made these observations into rigid rules of Esperanto. Notice that English has a large number of such negating prefixes -- a-, an-, de-, dis-, dys-, il-, in- (im-), non-, un- are a few of them, though they shade off into related senses with anti-, contra-, mal-, etc. I can't think of any negating suffixes in English (discounting Pig Latin), except perhaps the weasel suffixes (-ish, -like).

Anyway, back to the main story, such as it is: nesnesitelná is reasonably translated as unbearable in English, and insoportable in Spanish. Milan Kundera, a dissident Czech writer, eventually became an exile, living in France starting in 1975. Since publication of his work was banned in his native country, the audience for his works in translation became his primary readership. He therefore undertook a campaign to correct the translations in the three or four languages that he could read. In the cover story of the March 6, 1988 NYTimes Book Review, he complains about the translations of The Joke, which appeared in all major European languages in 1968-9:

In France, the translator rewrote the novel by ornamenting my style. In England, the publisher cut out all the reflective passages, eliminated the musicological chapters, changed the order of the parts, recomposed the novel. Another country: I meet my translator, a man who knows not a word of Czech. ``Then how did you translate it?'' ``With my heart.'' And he pulls a photo of me from his wallet. He was so congenial that I almost believed it was actually possible to translate by some telepathy of the heart. Of course, it turned out to be much simpler: he had worked from the French rewrite, as had the translator in Argentina.

BEING. Many friends advised me against the title ``The Unbearable Lightness of Being.'' [So would many of his readers.] Couldn't I at least cut out the word ``being''? This word makes everyone uncomfortable. When they come across it, translators tend to substitute more modest expressions: ``existence,'' ``life,'' ``condition'' . . . There was a Czech translator who decided to update Shakespeare: ``To live or not to live. . . .'' But it's precisely in that famous soliloquy that the difference between living and being is made clear: if after death we go on dreaming, if after death there still is something, then death (nonlife) does not free us of the horror of being. Hamlet raises the question of being, not of life. The horror of being: ``Death has two faces. One is nonbeing; the other is the terrifying material being of the corpse'' (``The Book of Laughter and Forgetting'').

The complete title of the Spanish translation of Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí is La insoportable levedad del ser. My sense of definite article use in Spanish is irremediably corrupted by my naturalization to English, but I can't shake the feeling that ``del'' is wrong in the Spanish version of the title: ``del ser'' can mean both ``of the being'' and ``of being.'' The infinitive functioning as gerund generally takes an article, whereas the phrase ser + <predicate> need not. I feel that in this instance ser should be regarded as ser + <null predicate> (so ``...levedad de ser''), which is how I parse the standard translation of Hamlet (¡Ser o no ser...!), but apparently this was not considered acceptable. (Ser as a gerund occurs in the standard expression ser humano, `human being,' which typically needs an article.) Then again, AIUI Slavic languages generally lack articles (or equivalent affixes as in Romanian). Does ``del ser'' preserve an ambiguity that English ``of being'' removes? Not every equivocation that can be preserved under translation should be. (More precisely: it may be best not to preserve a necessary or natural ambiguity with a translated ambiguity that is unnecessary or unnatural.)

Of important words in Kundera's famous title, so far we've considered being and (but lightly) unbearable. Surely the notion that lightness should be hard to bear demands examination. (This entry is part of the glossary's funhouse. I dare you to follow the preceding link.)

Bibliography:

• A. Gadgil, A. H. Rosenfeld, D. Arasteh and E. Ward: ``Advanced lighting and window technologies for reducing electricity consumption and peak demand: Overseas manufacturing and marketing opportunities'' in the proceedings of the IEA/ENEL Conference on Advanced Technologies for Electric Demand-Side Management (4-5 April 1991; Sorrento, Italy; hey, there's a Sorrento's Italian Restaurant on Central Avenue in Westfield, NJ -- I figured you'd wanna know).
• Amory B. Lovins and Ashok Gadgil have a related editorial on the web entitled ``The Negawatt Revolution: Electric Efficiency and Asian Development.''
• M. Anjali Sastry and A. Gadgil: ``Bombay Efficient Lighting Large-scale Experiment (BELLE): A blueprint for improving energy efficiency and reducing peak electric demand in a developing country,'' Urban Atmosphere/Atmospheric Environment 30(5), pp. 803-808 (1996).
• M. Anjali Sastry and A. Gadgil: ``Stalled on the road to the market: Lessons from a project promoting lighting efficiency in India,'' Energy Policy 22(2), pp. 151-162 (1994).
• Arthur H. Rosenfeld and Ellen Ward: ``Energy Use in Buildings,'' ch. 8 of The Energy-Environment Connection, ed. Jack M. Hollander (Washington, DC and Covelo, CA: Island Press, 1992), pp. 223-257.

You'd figure this would be an important distinction (especially to the animal and his prospective mates), but castration is such a common farm procedure that the words that specifically refer to castrated males tend to slide into generic use. The other important example is ox. (Three reasons for this practice: castrated males are more tame and don't compete for mates; castrating most of the males makes it much simpler to breed eugenically; castrated animals generally grow larger and stronger.) Also see hog.

Metaphorically, a bellwether is any leader of shifting masses, like Paris or New York in fashion. (Something about this deep down in the AIU entry.) As I have seen ``bellwether'' used over the past decades, it usually describes a leading indicator of trends rather than a leader, as New Hampshire used to be an indicator of national presidential elections.

For the many years that New Hampshire was the bellwether state, the saying went ``As New Hampshire goes, so goes the nation.'' It wasn't that reliable -- they went for Dewey in '48 and Nixon in '60, but then those were close elections. Then in 1972, Democratic nominee George McGovern was defeated in a landslide. His second and final running mate was R. Sargent Shriver, Jr. (that's a given name, not a misspelled -- on my part, anyway -- rank). Sargent Shriver had Kennedy connections (married into the family; first head of the Peace Corps when it was organized in JFK's administration). George did not even carry his home state of South Dakota. The ticket carried Shriver's home state of Massachusetts, and adjacent New Hampshire. For a while people joked, ``As New Hampshire goes, so goes Massachusetts.''

In the 2000 elections, the country divided into large, electorally rather homogeneous regions. The Democratic ticket won most of the Pacific coast states, the Northeast and Midwest; the Republican ticket won the rest, including a solid South. One of the exceptional states, going for a different party than its region, was New Hampshire, which went, like the country, for the G.O.P. More on that election at the Electoral Vote (EV) entry.

For more on bellybuttons, try the navel exercises entry.

In French the corresponding expression is Les Pays Bas, and in German it's a problem: The country we call the Netherlands is called die Niederlande in German, and just like the English name, it already itself means ``the low countries.'' (One of those countries is called Holland.) Like the English name, the German is somewhat archaic. But where nether is somewhat archaic in English, it is Lande that is archaic in German. As explained at the AbhKM entry, the modern plural of Land is Länder. If you wanted a modern compound noun meaning ``Low Countries'' in German, it would be Niederländer. The only problem is that this word already means `Dutchmen,' and in too many contexts would be either misunderstood that way, or just be confusing. German is not without a collective name for the Low Countries, however; they have die Beneluxländer.

Back to English now, I've seen the region described as ``the Benelux.'' As noted, the region is easily flooded, sometimes with troops from large neighboring countries. During the most recent such flood, WWII... The OED2 lists no earlier instances of this term than 1947, when it was still being written in quotes.

Japanese is written with many different character systems, in order to make it difficult (really, that's the theory). The principal sets are

1. kanji -- Chinese characters used as logographs (i.e., as in Chinese), of which an educated person needs to know a few thousand.
2. kana -- two parallel syllabaries of 46 characters each (48 counting the virtually obsolete characters for wi and we.) Katakana is used principally for foreign words, hiragana for the rest.
3. Latin characters, more precisely the letters of the English alphabet, called romaji.

The structure of benzene is typically drawn about as follows:

       H         H
        \       /
         C-----C
        /  ___  \
       /  /   \  \
  H---C  (     )  C---H
       \  \___/  /
        \       /
         C-----C
        /       \
       H         H

       H         H
        \       /
         C-----C
        //     \\
       //       \\
  H---C           C---H
       \         /
        \ _____ /
         C-----C
        /       \
       H         H

       H         H
        \ _____ /
         C-----C
        /       \
       /         \
  H---C           C---H
       \\       //
        \\     //
         C-----C
        /       \
       H         H

               H
                \
       H         C===O
        \       /
         C-----C
        /  ___  \
       /  /   \  \
  H---C  (     )  C---H
       \  \___/  /
        \       /
         C-----C
        /       \
       H         H

                  H
                /
               O
                \
       H         C===O
        \       /
         C-----C
        /  ___  \
       /  /   \  \
  H---C  (     )  C---H
       \  \___/  /
        \       /
         C-----C
        /       \
       H         H

                \
       H         C===O
        \       /
         C-----C
        /  ___  \
       /  /   \  \
  H---C  (     )  C---H
       \  \___/  /
        \       /
         C-----C
        /       \
       H         H

The benzoyl group is an instance of an acyl group.

Long used to bleach flour, now an ingredient in topical acne medications. A white crystalline solid.

There's also a Berlin in Germany, described here at its postal abbreviation entry BE.

A Berlin (or berlin) is also a four-wheeled covered carriage, or was. It's not obsolete if you're travelling through the Scrabble forest.

If you're like me, you probably remember as if it were yesterday, how shocked you were to discover that there is such a thing as French opera -- so I don't have to explain. Naturally I was staggered by the concept, and though I never at any point lost consciousness, I did sway noticeably. Ruth put her hand gently on my forearm and said firmly ``stay.''

This action gives a fair indication of my status in that pack. They weren't just my humanist friends, they were my human friends, and I was their pup, a combination part-time mascot and taxi. I learned some tricks too: ``stay, sit, fetch, lampoon the music theorist.''

Since this is the Berlioz entry, we should have some information about him. He was born in 1803.

Here's one from Dallas Semiconductor.

That's Joseph Bertrand, not Bertrand Russell.

Berytus is the ancient name of the originally Phoenician city that is now called Beirut in English and Beyrouth in French, pronounced Bairut in Arabic.

http://emj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/collection/bets

The Greek alphabet (named for its first two letters alpha and beta) was derived from some northwestern Semitic alphabet. The second letter of all Semitic alphabets is a bilabial consonant. In Ancient Hebrew, that bilabial consonant was plosive -- a 'b' sound. Just as in English, the consonant (called ``bet'' or ``beyt'' -- like ``beta'' minus the final vowel) was sometimes aspirated (as in the English word ``but'') and sometimes unaspirated (as in the English word ``tub''). Whether the sound was aspirated or not was determined completely by the surrounding letters. That is, the two sounds were allophones. There do not exist two words in Ancient Hebrew that differ only in the pronunciation of the beyt. (That remains true of native words in Hebrew -- words derived from the Semitic root base. In foreign loans -- and both Medieval and Modern Hebrew have a lot of them -- such a distinction may occur.) In the IPA, the aspirated and unaspirated versions of the sound can be distinguished with a superscript aitch to indicate aspiration -- /b/ and /b^h/, resp. In Hebrew, although it is not strictly necessary, one can indicate that the consonant is not aspirated by writing a dot in the middle of the character (this worked for other aspirated/unaspirated pairs as well). Over time, as pronunciation of the language evolved, the aspirated consonant evolved into a fricative, while the unaspirated one remained a plosive, so the consonants are now beyt and veyt. The mark on the beyt now indicates plosive rather than nonaspirated. It's useful now to be able to distinguish the two sounds, in order to transcribe foreign borrowings more accurately.

Type I diabetes (more information at DM entry) is an autoimmune disorder in which the immune system goes crazy and destroys the beta cells.

Beta is the Roman spelling (romaji) of a Japanese word meaning `quality,' so ``Betamax'' -- the formal name of the format -- could be interpreted as `highest quality.'

The other way to view the distinction is that the beta terms are used in certain nuclear or elementary-particle physics contexts. One doesn't call the conduction electrons in a semiconductor betas; one doesn't even call the electrons in an electron microscope or a linear accelerator betas. The term is reserved for electrons or positrons emitted in a nuclear decay, or generated in a particle collision. (Nuclear binding energies are on the MeV scale and in practice the energies of particle collisions studied in the laboratory are at least on this scale, so in practice the two loose definitions come out about the same.)

Just to tweak the second definition, however, I should note that there's an old nuclear-physics notation in which accelerated electrons (rather than electrons emitted in decay or from a collision) are represented by beta. That is in the shorthand A(b,c)D, representing a reaction in which an accelerated particle b strikes (``scatters off of'' or ``interacts with'' would be the usual terminology) a nucleus A that is stationary in the lab frame. After the reaction, a nucleus D is left behind and particles c fly off. In this notation, which is still used, if b is an electron it may be represented as β^-. I haven't spoken with a nuclear physicist lately and it's been a long time since I worked in the field, but I suppose this indicates another context where an electron (or positron, as β⁺) might be called a beta.

The letter beta happens to be used for something else that comes up frequently in the same context: speed. More precisely, v/c, or velocity magnitude in units of the speed of light, is normally represented by beta. Of course, if you set the value of c to unity, you can just write it v, but sometimes it's useful to make a distinction. The next Greek letter is also used for both a particle and a quantity in relativistic dynamics. The photon is represented by a lower-case gamma (γ -- no superscript, as it's uncharged). The Lorentz factor is also represented by a lower-case gamma, and it's closely related to beta: γ = (1-β²)½. These multiple uses of beta and gamma don't cause any more confusion than any related pair of homonyms do in English. (Offhand, I can't think of a good pair of homonym pairs, but a single pair might be ``dying,'' the present participle of die and dye. Hence the term ``suicide blonde.'')

In 1897, J.J. Thomson demonstrated that cathode rays are charged particles. As late as his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1906, he was still referring to these as ``corpuscles.'' The term beta particle came into use as it became clear that cathode rays consisted of the same particles that Rutherford called beta rays (entry follows below), discovered in radioactive decay. The name electron had been proposed by G. Johnstone Stoney in 1891 in the context of chemical bonding, and was eventually adopted as the general name for the particle.

Alpha, beta, and gamma rays, and neutrons, are the most common kinds of particle radiated by naturally-occurring radioactive isotopes (a/k/a radioisotopes). Those radioisotopes that have half-lives shorter than hundreds of millions of years (most of them, in other words) occur as part of the decay chains originating in very long-lived radioisotopes of heavy nuclei. Heavy nuclei generally have an excess of neutrons relative to lighter nuclei (see this B entry). Hence, alpha decay of heavy nuclei tends to yield neutron-rich lighter nuclei, and these tend to convert a neutron to a proton by beta decay, or just spit out a neutron. This simple picture of nuclear stability can be understood in terms of an essentially classical liquid-drop model.

Detail mostly irrelevant to this case: The simplest nonclassical (i.e., essentially quantum mechanical) correction is a pairing energy. The pairing energy is normally included in ``The Liquid-Drop Model.'' For large nuclei it is a fractionally small contribution to the total nuclear binding energy, but it alternates sign with the parity of the atomic mass number A. Hence, it can be a significant determinant of the relative stability of the isotopes of a given element. Since the parity of A is unchanged by alpha, beta, and gamma decays, however, it is a minor consideration here.

The binding energy of a nucleus is ultimately determined by the quantum mechanics of the interaction of its component nucleons. The simplest quantum-mechanical treatment of this problem (beyond pairing energy) is the shell model, in which the mutual interaction is dealt with in a mean-field kind of way: the nuclei are assumed to collectively define a potential well (typically approximated as a harmonic oscillator or a constant-depth spherical potential well, plus some spin-dependent corrections).

The shell model (or models, if you like) produces a fine structure in nuclear binding energy that is somewhat reminiscent of the structure of ionization energy as a function of atomic number. There are a set of ``magic numbers'' that are the nuclear analogues of filled shells in chemistry. When the number of neutrons or protons equals one of these magic numbers, the nucleus is unusually stable. (Doubly so for ``doubly magic'' nuclei, where both neutron number N and proton number [i.e. atomic number Z] are magic -- not necessarily, or even usually, the same magic number.) Thus, a decay that yields an unstable nucleus may yield one that has an excess of protons rather than neutrons. Nuclei with an excess of positive charge may decay by emitting a positron, but there are other mechanisms that are more common: emission of an alpha particle and electron capture (EC).

The phrase has subsequently been used ironically to suggest extreme loyalty to soccer teams (``football clubs'') whose team color is red. One example is Portadown FC (``the Ports''), in the Irish Premier League of Northern Ireland. That team's best-known fanzine, a satirical item, is (or perhaps was) ``Better Red Than Dead.'' The first volume was issued during the 1992-93 season, but the (fanzine) website was abandoned when I checked in 2007.

For many years (and also as I write in 2007), the most prominent red team in English soccer was Manchester United, and it's in reference to that team that I have usually encountered the jocular allusion, but that might be a local fluctuation. In 2003, 59-year-old Paul Warburton, a lifelong Manchester City fan (team color blue) was suffering from chronic lymphatic leukemia. His younger brother Martin, a United fan, agreed to a stem-cell transplant that might save Paul's life after Paul agreed in writing to a number of conditions all related to his renunciation of the Blues to become a faithful United fan. No word on enforcement provisions. (See, moreover, Paul's handwritten codicil above his signature.) Here's the story as reported in the Telegraph, under the title ``Better Red Than Dead.'' The story was also reported (by various other news sources) under the titles ``Life-Saving Goal,'' ``Brother's Pact with Red Devil,'' and ``Blue Blood Accepts Red Cell-Out.''

Another tenuous Russell-Manchester connection: Wittgenstein was an engineering student (aeronautics) at Manchester before he went to Cambridge in 1911 to study mathematical logic under Russell. In 1964, Stanley Reynolds published Better Dead Than Red. It wasn't about soccer.

In craps, to bet on the come is to make a bet on the coming-out roll. (On a casino table for craps, such bets are placed on a portion of the felt that's called the come bar.)

In poker, to bet on the come is to play a bad hand in hopes that cards will come that make it a better hand. I suppose there is a metaphysical distinction between this and a half-hearted bluff. The sense of the expression has been extended metaphorically to taking a hopeful risk in general.

Quebec has the same problem. If they designate a special police unit for the problem, it probably won't be called BEU, because the whole point of using French is to be different from English, so the acronyms have be different even if it requires an unnatural renaming. Hmmm. It appears there's another reason. In Quebec French, beu is a rude word for a police officer, like `pig' in English.

US truckers use an unflattering species-shifted expression for state police (especially Ohio State Police, I suspect). A US trucker in Quebec (I think this is allowed under NAFTA) could modify this expression to a more effective pun: ``Smokey the Beu.''

A 1946 novel by John P. Marquand was published under the title Polly Fulton in Britain and B.F.'s Daughter in the US. B.F., Burton Fulton, is a rich and important man, an industrialist, and his daughter Polly is like him in many ways. The story begins on the home front in the middle of WWII. Polly is Mrs. Tom Brett, and Tom is in Washington always doing war work, apparently.

Polly's mom seems to have an obsession with people not wearing enough underclothes. [Fast-forward to 2007: Attention all pop-tarts! Clothing, likewise unclothing, has consequences.] She recalls that when she and B.F. were first married, he ``would never wear any long underclothes either [like Polly], but only those things they used to call B.V.D.'s before everyone talked in initials....''

Great writers always return to important themes. Marquand to people attaching great significance to clothes (see attire, proper), I to initialisms.

And acronyms, of course. At Gray's Point, the ritzy New York suburb where the Fultons settled and Polly grew up, their neighbors include George Tasmin, a member of the NYSE. His son Bob, six years older than Polly, is clerking for a law firm in New York, and one day in chapter 15 they have a discussion at George's club. George wants to talk about the Bulwer Machine Company:

   ``Bulmaco they call it. It makes me tired -- that silly way of shuffling names together. They're having a directors' meeting Wednesday.''
   ``Bulmaco,'' Bob repeated. ``It didn't take much imagination to think that one up.''
   The conversation was making him uneasy.

You're probably wondering why I'm dragging you through this book, eh? Maybe I'm trying to establish the fundamental connection between abbreviation and attire. Nah, too obvious.

At one point, someone comments about Polly: ``Look at her striped dress. She's an American girl.'' It reminds me of my mother's observation, that American women favor abstract patterns for the decoration of their clothes, while floral patterns are much less common here than elsewhere.

Well, there are some spoilers ahead, so I had better tie up the loose ends of the general BF content so you people eager to read this 1946 best-seller can bail out in time. Don't neglect to rent the 1948 movie of the same name, which almost unaccountably gives Marquand credit for writing his novel. The relevant point is that the boyfriend concept is not a human universal. Polly and Bob fall in love, spend a lot of time together for two years and finally become engaged for a couple of days until Polly happens to meet and fall in love with Tom. In all that time, the words boyfriend and girlfriend never occur, and this makes sense. These words refer to a more-or-less romantic relationship that is in some sense open-ended. Boyfriendship and girlfriendship, to coin a couple of truly horrid words, do exist, but in Bob and Polly's milieu, oh, you'll never understand.

To tell you the truth, I'm wondering why the author is dragging us through this book. Or rather, I'm getting an idea why. It seems to be a roman à clef. The idea was to create good characters and bad characters, and have the bad characters advance the ideas that the author dislikes. The go-to bad guy is Tom Brett, the husband that we realized by page two that Polly must unload (my money is on his forcing it by turning out to be having a tawdry affair). So Tom is a snooty critic of English literature and former Columbia University instructor, a second-rater, living off his father-in-law's money, who becomes a central-planner for the FDR administration. TLA's suffer from guilt-by-FDR-association in Marquand's book:

... ``I've got to hear this, because I'm handling him. He's one of those VIP's we sent out there.''
    ``Don't talk in initials,'' Polly said. ``What's a VIP?''
    ``Very Important Personage,'' Tom said. ``We sent a lot of VIP's out there to help in the news roundups. They didn't want Milton much. All those uniformed fascists tried to stop him, but we put it over.''

Well, Tom's affair is in place, and Polly has let go, but things are looking grim for Mrs. Tasmin. She's too good to wander, and she's going to be traveling. I foresee a terrible accident. Only a few pages left... No! What a wimp-out of an ending! Bob just gives Polly some insight (you know -- some of the less-important observations that readers figured out two hundred pages earler), and they part ways as friends. Who needs deep insight about people that don't even exist? This is too depressing; I'm going back to reading old reliable Harlequin Romances. If all I wanted were wishy-washy endings and pointless misery, I'd read nonfiction.

For other film awards, see the AMPAS entry.

Sample sentence:

Ever since Mischa Barton started dating Cisco Adler, who previously went out with Kimberly Stewart, Paris Hilton has been going around saying snarky things about Mischa; that's because Kim and Paris are BFFs -- best friends forever.

God's Gift to Gossip, Paris Hilton, and those others, are also mentioned at the NYU entry.

Usage note: the BFF term has also been applied to male friends, and there was a 1994 movie with the title ``Lassie: Best Friends Are Forever.''

Dahl wrote this in a more innocent time, when Big F... Giant did not yet suggest a common intensifier with the odd property of following the adjective it modifies.

All honor to me, forbearing from the odious pun!

In my union (UUP) newsletter a few years ago, I read that BFI is based in Bellevue, Washington (just like SPIE) and is fighting organization by the Teamsters Union.

Ooooo EEEEE oooo! Chatachatachatachata.

I'm sure that Gloria Steinem had something clever to say about this, but it might be a shade too racy for us.

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.

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').

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

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.''

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

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.

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!''

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

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.

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

                  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.

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.

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.

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

                 C(CH )
                /    ³ ³
          _____/
         / ___ \
H C_____/ /   \ \_____OH
 ³      \ \___/ /
         \_____/
               \
                \
                 C(CH )
                     ³ ³

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

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 V<sub>pn</sub> > 0 or V<sub>D</sub> > 0, if the diode is not so far beneath notice that it has its own voltage variable named. (But beware: V<sub>D</sub> 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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

• Blackwood (see bidding in bridge
• CRASH
• DEPO
• DONT
• DOPI
• RKCB
• ROPI
• TRASH

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.

• Acol (see also SWINE)
• Romex

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.

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

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.

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.)

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.)

• The moment when our universe came into being, roughly speaking. This occurred about fifteen billion years ago.
• The deregulation of the London Stock Exchange (LSE). This occurred on October 27, 1986. On that day fixed brokerage commissions ended and the metaphorical wall separating brokers from market makers in securities fell. A unique supervisory system made up principally of self-regulatory industry groups will got underway at the same time. (The corresponding event on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) took place on May 1, 1975, and was known as May Day. From all reports, the subsequent months felt like MAY-DAY.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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 10<sup>9</sup>; 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).

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).

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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).

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):

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Vide error latency and signature analysis.

BITA is a member of BMHF.

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>.

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').

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

(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.)

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.

For more, see Chassis Dimensions in the NTEA's glossary of Truck Equipment Terms.

Actually, it was almost certainly a blackberry, but that didn't happen to rhyme with thumb.

In the Dissecting Room feature of The Lancet, in vol. 357, iss. # 9249 (6 January 2001), Hugh Tunstall-Pedoe published a short essay entitled ``Jack Horner and biomedical literature.'' It was a parable of priority in research and publication, but it was by no means the first article in a scientific journal to mention Jack Horner.

Most instances seem to occur in the biological literature. The earliest one I can find was ``Lambda as Little Jack Horner,'' on p. 64 of the 22 March 1972 issue of Nature New Biology [a short-lived offshoot of Nature (London)]. The article byline is ``from our Molecular Genetics Correspondent.'' Citing four recent articles, it observed that phage λ could be made to integrate (or observed to integrate, in practical terms) in a much broader range of bacterial DNA sites than had been previously, by deleting the usual site of its integration. On the same page, there was a small box announcing ``First Korner Lecture.''

The example concerning a land war in Asia was borrowed from The Princess Bride, a movie released in 1987, but it is always timely. And undergarments were also not a central concern of Cleese's statement (about which, more below). However, Debra Ginsberg does have something relevant on page 219 of Waiting.

... Waiters and waitresses don't get much leeway [in ``style''] when they are required to wear a uniform, so some become quite creative in finding ways to make the most of their physical attributes. In this restaurant [to which she gives the fictitious name Baciare, `to kiss'], the uniforms were designed with old Italian waiters in mind and consisted of a jacket, pants, and tie [alas, they don't go shirtless, as we soon learn]. One waitress put darts in her work jackets so they tailored her torso. [Ouch! That must hurt!] Combined with her skintight black pants, this made her look like some sort of futuristic cyberbabe on assignment from the future [she mustn't have got first choice]. A less outrageous touch employed by various waitresses involved wearing a black bra under the white shirt so that the design of the undergarment was just visible enough for the imagination to run wild.

None of this works so well if you have a deep natural tan.

From the first chapter of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, the first description of Julia:

One of them was a girl whom he often passed in the corridors. He did not know her name, but he knew that she worked in the Fiction Department. Presumably -- since he had sometimes seen her with oily hands and carrying a spanner -- she had some mechanical job on one of the novel-writing machines. She was a bold-looking girl, of about twenty-seven, with thick hair, a freckled face, and swift, athletic movements. A narrow scarlet sash, emblem of the Junior Anti-Sex League, was wound several times round the waist of her overalls, just tightly enough to bring out the shapeliness of her hips.

(The word you're thinking of is pneumatic. By the way, Oceania is at war with Eastasia. Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.)

While waiters and waitresses must usually conform to a uniform dress code, more often than not a host (hostess, seater, greeter, whatev-er) does not. For insight into that, see All dressed up and no place to go.

John Cleese's statement about mistakes is part of a speech entitled ``The Importance of Mistakes,'' which he delivered to a training and personnel conference in New York. The speech was excerpted in ``No more mistakes and you're through!'' an article by Dyan Machan in vol. 141, issue 11 of Forbes (May 16, 1988), pp. 126-7. Here's an excerpt of the excerpt:

I want to suggest to you that unless we have a tolerant attitude toward mistakes--I might almost say a positive attitude toward them--we shall be behaving irrationally, unscientifically and unsuccessfully.

Of course, if you now say to me, ``Look here, you weird limey, are you seriously advocating relaunching the Edsel?'' I will reply, ``No, Mac. There are mistakes and mistakes.'' There are true copper-bottomed mistakes like wearing a black bra under a white blouse, or, to take a more masculine example, starting a land war in Asia. I'm talking about mistakes that at the time they were committed did have a chance.

The entire speech was released as a training video shortly afterwards ($95).

Various versions of the quote are strewn across fortune files and the Internet. Here is a typical one of the longer versions:

I want to suggest to you today, that unless we have a tolerant attitude toward mistakes -- I might almost say ``a positive attitude toward them'' -- we shall be behaving irrationally, unscientifically, and unsuccessfully. Now, of course, if you now say to me, ``Look here, you weird Limey, are you seriously advocating relaunching the Edsel?'' I will reply, ``No.'' There are mistakes -- and mistakes. There are true, copper-bottom mistakes like spelling the word ``rabbit'' with three M's; wearing a black bra under a white shirt; or, to take a more masculine example, starting a land war in Asia. These are the kind of mistakes described by Mr. David Letterman as Brushes With Stupidity, because they have no reasonable chance of success.

For all I know, Cleese may have delivered similar remarks in different speeches. If all the quoted versions originated in the same speech, I incline to the view that most of the variation among versions is due to silent elisions and mistranscriptions rather than to embellishment.

Extended footnotes
1. From Andrew Young's memoir, An Easy Burden: The Civil Rights Movement and the Transformation of America (1996), pp. 95-96:

       Our voter registration drive [in Thomasville, Ga., for the 1956 elections] was not as successful as we had hoped--we were able to register only a handful of people. But our efforts helped Eisenhower carry Georgia by increasing the rolls even a little and encouraging those who were registered that it was an important election. Black voters in the South were still voting Republican, although most made an exception for Franklin Roosevelt. I voted for Eisenhower too. The Southern segregationists were all Democrats, and it was the black Republicans like John Wesley Dobbs, John Calhoun, and Q.V. Williamson who could effectively influence the appointment of federal judges in the South. The best civil rights judges in the South were the Eisenhower appointees: Frank Johnson in Alabama; Elbert Tuttle on the U.S. Court of Appeals; Brian Simpson, who would save my life in Florida; Minor Wisdom; and Skelly Wright on the D.C. Court of Appeals were all Republicans. These judges are among the many unsung heroes of the civil rights movement.

   
   John Minor Wisdom was appointed a judge of the US Court of Appeals for the the Fifth Circuit in 1957. We have a short list of oddly-named judges. You're probably wondering how Brian Simpson saved Andrew Young's life. It's not so dramatic and hardly clear-cut; I'll fill in later.

In 1653, the native Iroquois sent word to the French in Quebec, requesting that a "Black Robe" -- as Jesuit missionaries were referred to at that time -- travel to their country. In July of the following year, Father Simon LeMoyne made the multiday journey to the land that would become Syracuse and Onondaga County.

There, he lived among the native Onondaga -- a part of the Iroquois Confederacy -- for several months, and toured the entire region. It was Father LeMoyne who reached the salty shores of Onondaga Lake and realized its potential. At one time, Syracuse was known as the salt capital of the world.

A search on ``Simon Le Moyne'' at the Le Moyne College web site turns up nothing, but a google search does the trick. Father Le Moyne's work is commemorated in the seal of the college. The Le Moyne College yearbook is called ``The Black Robe.''

Clothing is frequently used in synechdoche. In Act II, Scene 4 of Shakespeare's ``The Tragedy of Macbeth,'' Macduff says to Ross,

Well, may you see things well done there: adieu!
Lest our old robes sit easier than our new!

Why is black wool cheaper? My guess: to reach to most hues and saturation levels by dying, it's harder -- if it's even possible -- if you start from black wool than if you start from white wool. But what if you like darker tones? This looks fashion-dependent. Cf. black monks and white monks.