C c

In case this wasn't obvious: Caia (later spelled Gaia, as above) was a woman's name corresponding to Caius (just as Julia corresponded to Julius). This name had nothing to do with the Greek word Gaia.

Yes, ``G.'' was sometimes used, but less often.

Frederic D. Allen wrote an article entitled ``Gajus or Gaïus'' for volume 2 of HSCP (1891), pp. 71-87, in order to collect in one place the evidence for whether Gaius was pronounced disyllabically (with a consonantal i) or trisyllabically. He marshaled evidence from Latin, other local languages (Faliscan, Oscan, and Etruscan cognates are known) and from Greek. His concluding paragraph:

      As results of the foregoing investigation, we may lay down: (1) that the name designated by the Romans by the letter C was originally Gauius; (2) that this form had passed into Gaius by 190 B.C., though it survived longer in some of the provinces of Italy; (3) that for some reason, not assignable at present, the customary pronunciation (of the educated classes at least) remained Gaïus (trisyllabic) at any rate until the end of the first century of our era, and probably still longer.

The puzzlement implied in the third point reflects the fact that while Gaius maintained its distract form, other -aiu- forms like Maius and Graius assume contract forms relatively early. Allen can think of no other explanation for the difference than the etymology (and the lingering usage) summarized in (1) and (2).

Learn useful stuff about carbon at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool. What's this? There are also lithium entries at WebElements and at Chemicool.

I really ought to have something to say about carbon, but I guess I'm just overwhelmed by the task. Have you ever heard of organic chemistry? Why don't you examine one of our diamond entries?

This is a sensible-enough proposition: compared with human scales of length and time, the precision with which time can be measured or defined is sharper than the corresponding length precision. Thus, defining a length unit in terms of a time unit allows one, in principle if not exactly in practice, to define a length unit more accurately than current length measurement allows. But however sensible this may be, and no matter for how long time measurement continues to be more precise than length measurement, the value of c will probably change at some point. The reason is that measurement is a simple but tedious subject which attracts minds that can master nothing more subtle. Self-important busybodies come to dominate the international weights-and-measures organizations during the long periods when well-enough ought to be left alone, and eventually they agree among themselves to make their dominance felt in some unnecessary decision or another.

Physicists often use a value of unity for the speed of light. That is, we assume that one second equals 299 million-odd meters. This is convenient and entirely legitimate, but at first (in a junior-level ``Modern Physics'' course, say) it can seem confusing. For one attempt to ease the discomfort, see the GeV entry.

In ``Genie In A Bottle,'' Christina Aguilera sings

Hormones racing at the speed of light But that don't mean it's gotta be tonight Baby baby baby (baby baby baby...)

For equally useless information, zip right on over to the 186000 entry.

There are different stories about the origin of the Fahrenheit scale (°F). I like the one according to which it was defined in terms of a zero set by a particular brine fusion point and a high temperature of 100 equal to the human body temperature. That would make Fahrenheit and Celsius both centigrade scales. However, I'm informed that ``other versions have the defined points at 0° and 96°; 32° and 96°; or even 0°, 32°, and 96°.'' Fahrenheit was vague about this in his one published explanation of how the scale was defined and thermometers calibrated, but seemed to imply he used all three points. It's been suggested that he was trying to disinform his competitors.

So Celsius thought the temperature should decrease when things got hot, and Fahrenheit was okay with water freezing at 2⁵ and body temperature about three times that, maybe. Didn't anybody have an intuitive system with sensible numbers? How about Réaumur?

Center is also a position in other sports, like...

Center is also a position in related sports like soccer and rugby, as well as many other team sports played on fields, courts, or rinks with two mirror symmetries (lacrosse, field and ice hockey, volleyball, basketball... the list goes on, but I don't). Center is usually a center forward (or center midfield) position, and the center or center-forward position is usually a scoring position. In football, the flashy players on offense and special teams are in the backfield. Football is like chess, with the forward positions uncelebrated, providing protection and making opportunities for the sprinters that start out behind. It's a game of strategy -- it's cerebral! That's why head protection is considered so important, see?

This is a good opportunity to mention that the chess game in the first Harry Potter book is a lot more convincing than quidditch in any of the rest that I've read. Quidditch is basically two games going on in parallel. One game has most of the players and more often than not is completely irrelevant. The other game is determined mostly by the ride, with glory going to the jockey. I tellya, it's pure make-believe.

At the time of the French revolution, an attempt was made to institute metric time, or at least more evenly-spaced, conventional time units. There were thus to be ten hours in a day and ten days in a week, exactly three weeks in every month, with five or six intercalary days at the end of every year. The idea never caught on, unless you count Mexico. In Mexico, you hear the expression ``ahorita nomás,'' but it sounds like ``horita nomás.'' That is: you are told ``in a small now'' and you think you hear ``in a little hour.''

There's a new effort to institute metric time. A proposal to standardize time references on the internet is based on thousandths of a day or 1.44 minutes (1:26.4), called pieces.

[An aitch elision that sounds similar is in name of a Classical Greek verb form known as aorist, which comes from a- and horizein. (It's not really an aitch, we write aitch to indicate rough breathing in Ancient Greek words.) Come to think of it, ahorita nomás is in fact a kind of aorist tense marker, indicating the action in a casual sort of way, without any real information about its completion. It could conceivably be useful in translating the Greek New Testament into Spanish. Okay, I'm joking. But in case you wanted to know, this flip bit of slang does not occur in any common Spanish translations of the Bible. Not even the dumbed-down (this is kind) Biblia en Lenguaje Sencillo.]

Thomas Jefferson, who was a big booster of decimal units (it is largely due to his influence that we had 100 cents per dollar while the British still had that colorful system of farthing, pence, and shilling), proposed a time standard that was based on a length unit (about a foot): the second was to be the small-oscillation period of a pendulum of standard length.

Note that the present system of numbering centuries was developed before the concept of zero had rediffused back into Europe. It's not clear what would have occurred in the alternative, but in the event, the first hundred years of the common era CE are known as the ``first'' century. This is preceded immediately by the ``first'' century BC or BCE. There is no zeroth century. Similarly, the first year of the first century CE (abbreviated a number of ways, including ``1 c. CE'') is the year one (abbreviated ``1 CE''). It is preceded immediately by the year 1 BCE, which is the last year of 1 c. BCE. In other words, there is no year zero either. Moreover, the first one hundred years, beginning from 1 CE, did not end in the year 99. Instead, they ended with the last day of the year 100. The new century thus began with the year 101. It is left as an exercise for the reader to show that 1901 was the first year of the twentieth century, and the twenty-first century will begin on New Year's Day in 2001. All of you people who celebrate at the end of 1999, it's like arriving an hour early for a party, only 8760 times worse.

To this, Wendy Warren answers ``The fun is when the calendar goes from one-nine-nine-nine to two-zero-zero-zero.'' According to a front-page article in the Monday, December 18, 1995 New York Times (which is often reliable) Warren and 900 of her closest friends have booked a hollow 600-foot obelisk in Seattle to celebrate the coming simultaneous triple-carry of the annual shift register.

TAFKAP had a hit record in the mid-eighties called ``(Tonight) We're Gonna Party Like It's Nineteen Ninety Nine.'' Already this year, the murder rate in Minneapolis is higher than in New York City. [National Lampoon's ``Deteriorata'' (a parody of Max Ehrman's ``Desiderata'') offers the following consolation: ``And reflect that whatever fortunes may be your lot, / It could only be worse in Milwaukee.'' Minneapolis is in Minnesota; Milwaukee is in Wisconsin. The consolation preceding the one just quoted is ``Take heart amid the deepening gloom that your dog is finally getting enough cheese.'' Wisconsin (WI) is known for cheese. What is the deeper meaning of this poem?]

The US Naval Observatory (USNO) is doing its best to proselytize for the true millennium.

Personally, I prefer ``Cucaracha!''

In many particular applications, trades, and industries, absent any qualification or special context, ``concentration'' is implicitly concentration of a particular standard substance that is understood. In the wastewater treatment industry, that's disinfectant.

There is a natural unit of charge, of course -- the magnitude of charge on the proton or electron, typically written e or q. This is 1.602 × 10^-19 C.

     1   1   1         1
     - + - + - + ... + - - ln(N) - C 
     1   2   3         N

The value of C is approximately 0.577215... It is sometimes convenient to define a quantity gamma = exp(C) = 1.781072...

Michael Neumann's extensive list of sample short programs in different programming languages includes four C programs, not all of them short.

There have been one or two non-MS compilers available since at least 2005, but outside of a machine running Windows, it's hard to see much reason to move from C++. Scratch that; Novell sponsors an open-source project called Mono that ``provides the necessary software to develop and run .NET client and server applications on Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, Windows, and Unix.'' Its programming languages include no platform-independent C++, but it does include a C# compiler. That has to beat learning Objective-C just to pull in an extra 10% market share. (Nothing against Objective-C, but it's very different from C++. Objective-C takes its object model and syntax from Smalltalk, while C++ uses Simula-type objects. Objective-C's message-passing way of dealing with objects might be a more natural fit for event-driven programs, and it's charming that Objective-C is a strict superset of C, but these things don't make recoding easy. Translating between C++ and Objective-C requires thinking across two different models.)

Michael Neumann's extensive list of sample short programs in different programming languages includes three C# programs.

``Double plus'' is a Newspeak adverb; that might be one of the better reasons to switch to C# (``cee sharp'').

Michael Neumann's extensive list of sample short programs in different programming languages includes over a dozen C++ programs.

Now you, dear reader, are obviously a very sensible person, as evidenced by the fact that you are looking things up here in a (very good, I may say) glossary, instead of risking a vocable miscue. Alas, not everyone is as intelligent or even as conscientious as you. Some people see the word circa enough times, and they think they know what it means when they don't. They lack imagination, which is a necessary component of learning -- if you can't imagine alternatives, then you risk supposing they don't exist, and thus failing to realize that you have guessed wrong. To cut to the chase, what I'm trying to say here is that some people wildly misunderstand the term circa. They seem to think it's a word that just goes in front of a number to indicate that the number is a year. I won't characterize these people further, but I will note that they apparently have a statistically enhanced probability of attending ed school.

For a variant of this, see the links from this page (``Gallery of Space Books'') that is part of The Space Educators' Handbook. Among the books linked from there one finds, for example ``TOM CORBETT : A TRIP TO THE MOON (circa 1953)'' above the image and ``Copyright, 1953, by Rockhill Radio Recording'' below. You get the idea.

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

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

The Villanova University Law School provides some links to state government web sites for California. USACityLink.com has a page mostly of California city and county links.

California is a community property state, but it's not the only one. I think Arizona is another. If you have a prenuptual agreement, then the community property laws still have to kick in at the end of ten years. Tom Cruise filed for divorce from Nicole Kidman as their tenth anniversary was approaching. I guess he couldn't think of what to get her. Or could.

The California Historical Society is online.

In 2003, California found itself in a hole about $38 billion deep. Governor Gray Davis suggested balancing the budget by firing all the teachers and tripling the auto registration fee, but he was only able to fully implement the second part of this plan. Nominally, the budget was balanced by the usual accounting tricks, but there's something truly original on the way: California is going to balance its budget by a direct application of democratic principles. Specifically, they're holding a recall election to see if Davis can keep his job, and who gets to replace him -- and anyone can get on the ballot for $3500. Everyone's joining the party! If just one third of California's population buys a place on the ballot, the budget will swing into surplus. Unbelievable! As I write on August 6, they're well on their way to solvency. I think I've heard about four million gubernatorial hopefuls who already filed their papers. There are probably also some relative unknowns (that girl I mention in the rehab entry, for example) who've filed but haven't had their fifteen minutes of air, yet. (Thank the gods for all those satellite channels.) Of course, because being a candidate for high state office has become so commonplace, a lot of people forget whether they've already filed; these people are encouraged to file again -- twice, thrice, whatever they can afford out of the Social Security check. They're always assured that ``filing again can not reduce your chances of winning.'' This is great! Good news: I hear the filing deadline will be extended due to ``unforeseen delays'' -- the unusual number of candidates is causing some logistical difficulties in the paper-ballot districts -- this is a uncharted seas for the phone-book publishers.

``Canadian initiative, Canadian initiative, ...'' works better than ``one sheep, two sheep, ....''

In breakfast menus, ``Canadian'' is an adjective meaning `with bacon,' just as ``Virginia'' is a dinner-menu adjective meaning `glazed ham' and ``Hawaiian'' is just an elegant way of saying `with a pineapple annulus.' ``Wisconsin'' (WI) means `with yellow cheese.' `Nova Scotia' or just `Nova' (in a food context) means `lots of fresh,' but can only modify the word salmon. ``Louisiana'' means `cooked with hot spices, and imagine accordion music in the background.' ``New York'' is a restaurant term meaning expensive. ``New York-style cheesecake'' is mostly manufactured in Philadelphia. Here's what Alice May Brock says:

Tomatoes and oregano make it Italian; wine and tarragon make it French. Sour cream makes it Russian; lemon and cinnamon make it Greek. Soy sauce makes it Chinese; garlic makes it good.

When this entry was first written, Canada had ten provinces and two territories. The territories were distinguished by the fact that their capital cities had concatenated compound common nouns as names. To wit:

• Northwest Territories (NT): Yellowknife
• Yukon Territory (YT): Whitehorse

There's a search site called <canada.com>.

On April 1, 1999, the region previously called the Northwest Territories (prescient plural there) fissioned into two, with about the eastern half becoming the new Nunavut Territory; the capital is Iqaluit (formerly called Frobisher Bay). Alas, Iqaluit doesn't look like a concatenated compound common noun, but you never know. I don't at any rate. Agglutination is a common feature of North American autochthon languages, so there's hope. ``Frobisher Bay'' at least consisted of two nouns, though they weren't concatenated and one was proper.

Here's the Canadian page of an X.500 directory.

If I had to guess, I'd say that the ccTLD with the greatest number of hyphenated second-level domains is <.ca>, on account of all the bilingual acronym pairs. The CBC sponsors a Canadian-oriented search engine called MegaCrawler. Not a whisper of French -- I am amazed. (To follow their links, copy the URL and remove the duplicated part.) There's also a Friendly Canadian search site that appears to use babelfish machine translation. Even Yahoo! Canada does better than that!

The Reform Party of Canada was founded by Preston Manning in 1987. For a while in the late 1990's the party was trying to enlarge by merging with some smaller parties on the right, which after the humiliation of 1993 included the Tories (also called Conservatives, PC), but the Tories weren't interested. Manning made a renewed push in this direction in 1998, and in 1999 a few provincial Tories from Ontario and Alberta left the PC and created a forthrightly temporary party called the United Alternative for the express purpose of consummating some such merger. In 2000, Reform and United Alternative merged.

At one time it appeared that the new name would be Conservative-Reform Alliance Party, which would have had a pronounceable acronym, but for unknown reasons that name wasn't chosen. Instead they have become the Canadian Reform Conservative (no hyphen!) Alliance, with an official short form of Canadian Alliance and an official abbreviation of CA for that. (Note that ``(no hyphen!)'' is not part of the name. It's a comment. I should have written it with square brackets so that not so many readers would have been confused.)

``Progressive Conservative,'' ``Reform Conservative'' ... diet sugar, compassionate conservative, sofa-bed, hurry up and wait. Something for everyone, a comedy tonight!

In the federal elections of 2000, the Canadian Alliance failed to make the ``breakthrough'' it had long hoped for in the east (i.e., in Ontario), while the Tories sank a little deeper. In 2003-4, Canadian Alliance and Tories merged, and Canadian Alliance ceased to be used as a party name. Stockwell Day, who is discussed at the Victoria Day entry, became shadow Foreign Minister and took the opportunity to visit lots of foreign countries.

U. Frisch, B. Hasslacher, and Y. Pomeau, Phys. Rev. Lett. 56, 1505 (1986), showed that a particular class of local, hexagonally coordinated two-dimensional lattice gases evolve according to conventional two-dimensional hydrodynamic equations.

Here are a few CA links. Cf. QCA.

As you might expect from an essentially national organization that eschews any geographic or political cue in its name, this is one of those associations that sometimes styles itself ``The Association.''

The Classical Association publishes three journals, all of them important in the UK and other places where there are classical scholars who can read English: Classical Review, Classical Quarterly and Greece & Rome. (In 2005, with the sole purpose of mystifying everyone, CA switched publishers for these journals from Oxford to Cambridge U.P.)

In the interest of full disclosure, and so you can see what incorrect glossary entries look like (as we steadily work to extirpate them), here is what this entry used to read in its entirety:

PRC (Chinese) national airline. Supposed to be ``China Administration of Civil Aviation'' but the order is wrong, so it's probably French. The only English expansion seems to be `Chinese Airliners Always Crash.' Similar expansions at this site or this one. More explanation from Hong Kong. (Visit before July 1, 1997! Oops, too late. Don't visit now.) Note that if ``China Administration of Civil Aviation'' really were the expansion, its acronym would be a child's dirty word in many European languages. Here's the Air China site; I don't know of a specific CAAC site. (Use this alternate URL if you want to drag out the experience.)

On January 2, 1997 the Chinese government publicly congratulated itself for a record 29 accident-free months for the nation's airlines. (They waited until after the last plane had landed safely before the New Year.) The International Airline Passenger Association (IAPA) had cited China as one of the most dangerous countries in which to fly in 1994.

At education-world.com, there's a curriculum article'' explaining that ``HIV/AIDS Education Isn't Only for Health Class! (It's for English, Math, Science, Spanish.)'' The article continues...

HIV/AIDS curriculum is often relegated to Health class where instruction can be clinical and boring. But at Patrick Henry High School in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a special AIDS Awareness Week program involved teachers of all disciplines. AIDS education came to life in art class and English class, in math and in geography.

The ``Atlantic states'' are New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland and the District of Columbia. The organization name is pronounced ``cass'' (to rhyme with pass) by its members; the 1999 Fall meeting was in Easton, PA. The Spring 2000 meeting was in Princeton. After that, they let the website slide. Dang, and Janice tells me the Fall 2000 one was the best in at least eleven years.

Well, the Spring 2001 meeting was in New Rochelle, New York at the end of April, and I finally went. Boy was I embarrassed! Everybody laughed at me, except a couple of people who thought I was joking and laughed with me (I could tell from their ear-lobe muscles). But I wasn't laughing very hard. I was humiliated. It turns out that the Latin C - A - A - S phrase in the seal doesn't translate ``Classical Association of the Atlantic States'' after all.

How was I to know? Causa looks a bit like Classical. I mean, the words have to be different in different languages, or they wouldn't be different languages, now would they? So there: Quod Erat Disputandum (Q.E.D.). After all, just look at the words: does causa or scientam remind you of any particular word in English? I thought not. I tell ya, it's not fair. It's not fair!

They say that Causa Artium Alit Scientiam means `the cause of the arts nourishes science.' This is a somewhat biased reading: scientia meant `knowledge.' The current meaning of its English cognate science represents an adaptation and restriction of the meaning of the French etymon. The Germans use Wissenschaft.

Okay, so some months after the Spring meeting, I got another copy of the program, along with a standard sheet entitled ``Professional Development Documentation.'' There CAAS is revealed to have provider/district registration number 1879, and the meeting turns out to be a professional development activity. I was there two days and I only accrued Professional Development in the actual amount of six hours? Add insult to injury.

I mentioned this to my cousin Victoria, who teaches bilingual kindergarten in California. She says she could use the hours. The states require public school teachers to do unbelievable amounts of often pointless busy-work, like accruing professional development hours or filling out forms detailing microscopically how each component of their lesson plans meets which of the state's myriad educational achievement goals. It's exactly like being punished by being made to stay after school.

In the US, private schools manage to escape a large part of this burden. An anonymous informant in the other .ca place reports on work conditions under the Catholic school board there:

A requirement of the permanent contract is passing a course in religious instruction. The course ran five months, once a week for three hours. This was the first year the course has been so onerous (I won't even get into the idiot assignments we had to do) and it was so onerous because the OCT won't recognize it as an official course if it doesn't have hours and work equivalent to a university-level course. Attendance was mandatory (you were allowed to miss at most two classes).

At professional meetings, it would be offensive to ``take attendance.'' One thing that surprised me about the CAAS meeting was the large number of participant packages (detailed program, meal tickets, pin-on ID) that were not picked up. A lot of people seem to have paid admission and not come for the show. I can't imagine what they got out of it.

You know, I was sure I had the URL for this around somewhere. Where did it go? It should be right -- Oh no! I've been hit by ...

The really scary thing about these guys is how fast and silently they work. Turn your head away from the computer, and it's gone (the bookmark, not the computer; this entry isn't about hardware theft). They're just like those softwear pirates. Look away from the tumbling and spinning clothing mass, and before you even know it, they've socked it to ya. Vicious peg-leg pirates who ``only take what we need,'' but you're left holding the bag -- of unmatched socks. Fgrep won't get you a.out of this one.

It should be obvious: just promote them to the next grade regardless whether they learned anything or not.

CAB holds its annual convention in October.

Alfred E. Kahn was the last head of the CAB, and he eagerly argued his job out of existence. He told an airline executive ``I really don't know one plane from another. To me they're just marginal costs with wings.'' After the CAB was disbanded, president Jimmy Carter made Kahn ``inflation czar.'' In a way, this was very appropriate for a man who in the long run lowered the real costs of air travel. However, Carter didn't give Kahn any power. Nobody on the fiscal side had any power over inflation in those years (see WIN), and in the Carter years inflation was compounded by economic stagnation (i.e., low or negative economic growth). The combination came to be called stagflation. The trouble with fiscal measures against stagflation was (and is) that increased government spending fuels recovery but worsens inflation (in theory). When Ronald Reagan ran against Carter in 1980, he made ``Are you better off now than you were four years ago?'' an effective campaign mantra. Fiscal measures not availing, and Reagan promising increased spending combined with tax cuts, Paul Volker applied the monetary brakes. Volker, appointed chairman of the Fed by Carter, raised interest rates (in the usual indirect ways, by raising the reserve rate and decreasing money supply) dramatically early in the Reagan administration, triggering the worst recession in US post-war history. That seems to have done the trick for twenty years. Amazing.

Another connection between cabbage and the human body, beside the latter eating the former and the former inflating the latter: cabbage is doctors' slang for a heart bypass, evidently derived from the common pronunciation of CABG. This usage has so far only come to the attention of SBF investigators in Canada, but the border is porous. (In fact, this porosity is a significant consideration when provincial governments negotiate compensation with physicians. It turns out that the physiology of Canadians and Americans is quite similar -- we have over 99% of our genes in common -- so Canadian physicians are able to find work in the US with very little retraining.)

I read once that ``my little cabbage'' (or however that's translated) is an affectionate lover's pet-epithet in France. Romaine?

In California, bilingual education basically means education in Spanish and English.

Massachusetts had something similar, and the famous Boston saying that ``the Lodges speak only to the Cabots, and the Cabots speak only to God.'' As you can imagine, moving in such restricted social circles limited their marriage prospects, so the most famous Lodges and Cabots were Cabot Lodges. Then came the Kennedys -- new money (hold your nose).

Interestingly, Branch Cabell was born at 101 E. Franklin Street. What's that you say? You say that doesn't seem very interesting? Well just let me finish! That address is now the site of the Richmond Public Library. If they would just move to new digs, they could make that place the Branch Cabell Branch Library. As it is, there's a James Branch Cabell Library at VCU, but it seems to be the principal library on the main (Monroe Park) campus.

They were sponsored by the NCTA, which in eventually created a ``National Academy of Cable Programming'' which oversaw and tried to lend a little lightweight gravitas to the awards from 1985 on. The original pretext for these NCTA-sponsored awards was the exclusion of cable TV programming from eligibility for the Emmy Awards. Cable shows became Emmy-eligible in 1988, but the disappearance of an organization's raison d'être is hardly enough, on its own, for the organization to fold. That the ACE thing coasted along for less than a decade after 1988 is thanks solely to its having a stupid name.

The awards were given annually from 1979 to 1997, but not in 1986 and twice in 1995, because they temporarily switched the event from December to January. (Cf. APA annual meetings.) The awards ceremonies took place in LA, often at the Wiltern Theatre. I never heard of it either. They were very memorable. Save a link to this page at IMDb, listing results of an ongoing investigation into who, if anyone, was honored by these awards.

In the US, the word was adopted in railroading to refer to a train car for the use of the train crew, usually the last car on a freight train. That car would have kitchen and sleeping facilities. Cabooses (I wish the plural were cabeese) are largely obsolete. Loosely, the word is used to mean the last car. This usage should be continued because it infuriates railroad buffs. In the UK, cabeese (what the heck), or at least the word caboose for such a car, never caught on. Presumably this is because it's a small country.

A caboose served other purposes besides quartering the crew. Crew on the caboose monitored the freight cars and cargo for problems like overheating axleboxes and load shifting. The last car is (was? was and now will be again?) sometimes a guard's van.

In Canada, the word caboose was also adopted for a mobile bunkhouse used by lumberjacks.

Cache is pronounced like ``cash.'' It frequently occurs as a misspelling of cachet (pronounced ``cash-AY''). For example, a Reuters wire report on August 30, 2005, included some comments of Brandimensions COO Bradley Silver interpreting poor box office results: ``He also said that the data indicates that even movie stars don't have the same cache as they once did.'' (Then again, maybe animatronics is more pervasive than I ever suspected.)

Pronounced khaki. Part of the religion of Demmingism.

Caca and similar-sounding words, from the Latin, mean `shit' in various European languages (particularly Romance languages; sometimes, given the form, a children's word). The tendency is for the word to have female gender, so the regularly constructed Italian plural would be cache (pronounced kah-keh, not like cache) rather than cachi (male plural, pronounced kah-kee). Actually, the count-noun version is probably pretty rare.

About 3 cm in diameter and 1 cm high, or thick.

``PROUDLY Made in U.S.A.''
Owned and Operated by Americans''

After all, what country is better known for delicious cookies? Don't answer that.

Important selling points:

1. RIGHT size enjoyable by old and young alike. (I'm still thinking about this one.)
2. SMALL size, so if you're counting calories you can just eat a few and not feel guilty (just 20 Calories per cookie).
3. Entire manufacturing process automated from mixing room to bagging. Cookies untouched by human hands other than purchaser's.

Bud's Best Cookies, Inc., is located in Hoover, Alabama. That's outside of Birmingham. It started in 1992 with an initial investment of $12 million, and as of 1999 was making a million cookies a year. Of course, those are small cookies.

Cf. Kako.

A website for Houston, in TX [a state bordering on and once part of Mexico (.mx)], is eager to advance the international money-based amity that NAFTA was partly intended to foster. Their currency converter defaults to CAD/USD. On the upswing in 1999.

A popular CAD package is AutoCAD, for which there are usenet newsgroups comp.cad.autocad and alt.cad.autocad and some online faq's. The scripting language for AutoCAD is a version of LISP called AutoLISP. An extensive multipart FAQ for AutoLISP (including recent releases called Visual Lisp, Vital Lisp and ACOMP) appear in the AutoCAD newsgroups; a hypertext version is here.

Oh, here's something: in chapter two of her What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us, Danielle Crittenden reports that ``that in [her mother-in-law's] college circles in the mid-1950s, a man who took a woman out for more than three dates without intending marriage was considered a cad.''

Wow. I'm always shocked when the ``joke'' entries are confirmed true. (This happens constantly.)

She continues ``Today, the man who considered marriage so rashly would be thought a fool. Likewise, a woman.'' Apparently, what her mother didn't tell her she found out from her mother-in-law. The world changes in unexpected ways. What your mother-in-law didn't tell you, you could look up on the internet, if only you knew where to look.

Cada is derived from the Late or Vulgar Latin word cata. This was used with much the same sense as cada, but in a construction that might have made gender agreement slightly tricky. Everyone seems to agree that Latin borrowed the word from the Greek preposition kata.

Constellations are named after things they resemble, or evoke, or at least sort of seemed to suggest to whatever sleepyhead named them. (We'll pull in the cloud-interpretation scene from Hamlet later.) The official IAU constellation names are Latin. Caelum is a well-known Latin word meaning `sky.' That some stars may resemble or at least suggest the sky is very plausible -- you'll have no argument from me. So alpha Caeli could be interpreted, mischievously, as the `first [brightest star] of the sky,' but it's really the brightest in the constellation Caelum, which is a pretty drab bit of sky between Columba and Eridanus. The respect in which Caelum suggests the sky is that it's mostly black.

The most common alternative meanings of caelum are closely related to `sky' -- heaven, vault of heaven. Metonymic senses are common as well (air, atmosphere, temperature, climate, weather, horizon, height, vault, arch, covering). There's also a rather less common word caelum, which happens to have the same spelling, declension, and gender, and which essentially means `precision chisel' (L&S defines it as a ``chisel or burin of the sculptor or engraver, a graver'').

We have Abbé Nicolas Louis de Lacaille to thank for this bad joke of a constellation name. The great achievement of de Lacaille (1713-1762) was to get in on the ground floor of the constellation-naming business by breaking open a whole new unclaimed territory (the southern hemisphere, basically). He spent the nights of 1750-1754 reportedly observing over 10,000 stars from the Cape of Good Hope with his 1/2-inch refractor. He ended up inventing fifteen new constellations and renaming an earlier one as Musca Australis (see the constellations entry). Fortunately, many of the other bad names he came up with were so cumbersome that it was considered permissible, despite his priority, to at least shorten them.

In Latin, caedo means `I cut.' The stem changes to caes- in various related words. (This common stem change is evident in many sets of English words derived from Latin: video and vision, for example, and all Latin-derived verbs ending in -de that form nouns in -sion.)

At some point, a story got started that either Julius Caesar, or the first person with that gens (see tria nomina) was delivered surgically, and hence the name attached itself to the operation. Inasmuch as it would help explain the origin of the gens name, one would expect the story to concern an ancestor of Julius Caesar. Yet, many dictionaries, including the OED, repeat the legend that Julius himself was so born. Suetonius's mention of Aurelia (Div. Jul. 13, 74.2) also diminishes the plausibility of this legend.

It is a common pattern for ae in Latin-derived words to become e in US spelling, so many US dictionaries give ``cesarean'' as the standard spelling and ``caesarean'' as a variant. In fact, a quick web search suggests that the -e- spelling is three times as common as the -ae- spelling. However, the ae-to-e transformation is not standard for Latin names (or for the Latin versions of Greek names that we use, where alpha-iota or alpha with iota subscript was systematically transliterated ae, as in Aeschylus). Given the etymology, therefore, I think caesarean should be preferred.

``This new CAFE will measure `petroleum mileage' and give automakers incentives and credits for increasing ethanol consumption as a percentage of fuel use of their vehicles, not least by promoting flex-fuel vehicles, which can run on either gasoline or E85 fuel, a blend of 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline. This approach promises several significant benefits.'' Particularly to corn farmers.

Also, if you mix with some accordion music you don't need to film Paris on location.

``The Committee on Ancient History desires to publish papers and short manuscripts that employ original research, critical review, and innovative methodology to promote the pedagogy of Ancient History. The Committee understands Ancient History generally to reflect all aspects of the development of societies in those areas about the Mediterranean basin and its peripheral regions before ca. AD 500. Submissions that make use of digital technology are encouraged, as are those using traditional print styles. All submissions accepted for inclusion in the Occasional Papers will be published electronically. Though English is preferred, the editors will consider submissions in any of the major instructional languages of North America.''

``Although known in Greece as the Canadian Archaeological Institute at Athens, the Institute is directly responsible to its mother company, the Canadian Academic Institute, which operates solely in Canada.'' So in CAIA expansions, ``in Athens'' means in Toronto, Canada, and ``at Athens'' means in Athens, Greece.

The French is no better: `L'Institut Canadien Académique à Athènes / L'Institut Canadien d'Archéologie à Athènes' (ICAA).

Also on the page quoted above, an explanation of why you might expect other such institutes at Athens (e.g.: ASCSA, BSA):

``Because the Greek government requires that archaeological work by foreigners ... be carried out under the auspices of their own national organizations with offices in Greece.''

The physical cause of the loss of [NASA space shuttle] Columbia and its crew was a breach in the Thermal Protection System on the leading edge of the left wing, caused by a piece of insulating foam which separated from the left bipod ramp section of the External Tank at 81.7 seconds after launch, and struck the wing in the vicinity of the lower half of Reinforced Carbon-Carbon panel number 8. During re-entry this breach in the Thermal Protection System allowed superheated air to penetrate through the leading edge insulation and progressively melt the aluminum structure of the left wing, resulting in a weakening of the structure until increasing aerodynamic forces caused loss of control, failure of the wing, and breakup of the Orbiter. This breakup occurred in a flight regime in which, given the current design of the Orbiter, there was no possibility for the crew to survive.

Edmund Burke, a great favorite of quote books, wrote this eulogy in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790):

It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the Queen of France, then the Dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in,-glittering like the morning star, full of life, and splendour, and joy. Oh! what a revolution! and what a heart I must have, to comtemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall! Little did I dream when she added titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, that she should ever be obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom; little did I dream that I should have lived to see disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honour, and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever.

Somehow the ideas of women and calculators seem to attract, sure. At Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project, most of the calculators (calculatrices?) were women. (I think Richard Feynman described in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman how at one point, his task was to organize the human card-sorting dance that got the calculations done.) Stanislaw Ulam told a story about one calculatrix in his autobiography (p. 218; title and the rest at the 86 entry), although by the time he wrote the book he was using the anachronistic term ``programmer.''

I particularly remember one of the programmers who was really beautiful and well endowed. She would come to my office with the results of the daily computation. Large sheets of paper were filled with numbers. She would unfold them in front of her low-cut Spanish blouse and ask, ``How do they look?'' and I would exclaim ``They look marvelous!'' to the entertainment of Fermi and others in the office at the time.

There's a picture of an attractive young woman and an old mechanical calculator at the HW (for hardware) entry.

In August of 1914, Edward Grey, Viscount of Falloden, wrote an echo of Burke's words on Europe and the extinction of the light:

The lamps are going out all over Europe; we will not see them lit again in our lifetime.

He died in 1933. More on the end of the age of chivalry at the Taxasaurus entry.

Incidentally, you notice that Burke referred to the Queen of France as the Dauphiness? The King of France was called the Dauphin after the dolphins on his coat of arms.

The word calculus has continued to be used for various methods of calculation, as in ``differential calculus,'' or simply to emphasize the mathematical quality of a reasoning process, as in ``moral calculus.'' I really didn't want to write this much, but as long as I'm on this I'll mention that the words checkerboard and Exchequer are derived from the use of a table or sheet (a checker board) cross-ruled in squares to function as an abacus (for checking figures). We actually have more information on calculus at the abacus entry than at the calculus entry, and vice versa. If I'm not careful, this glossary could get to be quite odd.

``Software associated with papers published in the Transactions on Mathematical Software, as well as other ACM journals are incorporated in CALGO. This software is refereed for originality, accuracy, robustness, completeness, portability, and lasting value.''

The more recent algorithms can be downloaded from the ACM server, and used subject to the ACM Software Copyright and License Agreement.

They can put a man on the moon, but they can't make a pill that you swallow and the next day you wake up speaking a strange language. (Not counting LSD).

again, Because didn't he meet not obviously. or question. really talk That's the to want with you

1. The claim is unpopular with the speaker, and
2. the research fails to demonstrate that the claim is true or false with any degree of probability.

If the claim at first appears to be demonstrated false, but then the research is shown to be so flawed as to make any conclusion impossible, then the research is said to seriously call into question the (obviously false) claim.

The calorie was originally defined as the quantity of energy needed to raise the temperature of one gram of water by one degree Celsius. The precise pressure and temperature (interval) at which the defining measurement is supposed to be made have varied, and calorimetry itself is not such a hot (Ha-ha! Pun intended. Laugh, netsurfer, this was for you!) way to define an energy unit. Thus, over time there have been a number of different calorie definitions; it has been 4.185 ± 0.001 joule according to the most widely accepted definitions.

Okay, for you anals out there, the 4-degree calorie is 4.2045 joules, the 15-degree calorie is 4.1855 J, the mean 0-100 degree calorie is 4.1897 J. There's also the international steam calorie, 4.1868 J, and the ``thermochemical'' or ``defined'' calorie, which is simply an assigned value of 4.1840 J, the preferred value today.

[The value of a calorie, expressed in a unit such as joules or ergs is sometimes called the ``mechanical equivalent of heat,'' because it allows conversion between energy measured as heat flow to energy defined fundamentally in mechanical terms.]

Medical Calorie

Other languages, such as English, used to capitalize much more extensively than they do now. Capitalization of all nouns was a feature of Danish -- a language used in Denmark, Greenland (at least theoretically), and in the more urban areas of Norway when it was the subordinate partner in a Danish-Norwegian dual kingdom. Norway gained a kind of independence, and complete political independence from Denmark, by the Treaty of Kiel of January 14, 1814. Under its terms the dual monarchy was dissolved, and Norway was ceded by the King of Denmark to the King of Sweden. Norwegian national spirit expressed itself partly as language reform, a phenomenon which I'm amazed to discover I haven't discussed at any length elsewhere in this glossary, though at the bok entry I do mention Bokmål. The latter (`book language') is very similar to Danish (called Rijksmål, `language of the empire,' at the time of independence). FWIW, Danish pronunciation is so odd that the Norwegian and Danish versions sound rather more different than Norwegian and Swedish do.

The major language reform during the period of Swedish rule (to 1905) was the establishment of Nynorsk on an equal legal footing with Bokmål (this was initially more de jure than de facto, since officials tended to be educated in Bokmål or Swedish). Nynorsk (`New Norwegian') began as a synthesis of Norwegian dialects spoken in rural areas, created by the native philologist Ivar Andreas Aasen (1813-1896) and introduced by him as Landsmaal (`Country Language') in 1853. Aasen promoted his synthesis as the authentic Norwegian language, and advocated its use as a literary language. He even wrote some original poetry in Landsmaal (whether this actually advanced the cause, I'm not sure). Anyway, around 1880, and probably mixed in with this though I don't know the details, universal noun capitalization was abolished in Norway. Denmark itself abolished universal noun capitalization in 1948. In Denmark, this capped (Another pun, netsurfer! You're helplessly ROTFLYAO!) a period during which universal noun capitalization had become increasingly uncommon. (You know, Shakespeare's Hamlet is set in Denmark. You should read our more honored in the breach entry.) Nevertheless, I note that the reform came three years after the end of WWII and the German occupation of Denmark. So whatever other factors may have been involved, two countries that formally abolished universal noun capitalization did so following the end of involuntary foreign rule. (Per tells me that back home in Denmark, nutritional information is listed in the tiny calories. It must make the food seem richer.)

The attempt to distinguish different things by different capitalization of a single word has been tried in other situations, and it has a poor record of success; among the reasons must be counted the different capitalization conventions of different languages (see previous two paragraphs), the ignorance of copyeditors (see kT entry), and the general carelessness of writers (see this sentence). A recent example of the attempt, already failed, is in the distinction between the unitary Internet and various relatively disconnected or insulated internets. The hoped-for usage was still described in the 1992 edition of the O'Reilly book on DNS and BIND, still in print as of 1997. However, at least since 1995, the lower-case kind of internet has been approximately what is now called intranet. Another example of an attempt to make a case-based distinction in informatics is in the case of gigabytes and gigabits (GB and Gb, respectively). Case is also significant in the abbreviations of many numerical prefixes in the SI.

Ultimately, the only reliable way to be sure of which calorie is meant is to observe context and to use common sense: it's hard to make a 1000X error if one is familiar with chemical quantities. Basal metabolic rate (BMR) for an adult human is on the order of a couple of thousand kilocalories a day.

In Ronald DeLorenzo's Problem Solving in General Chemistry, which had a second edition in 1993, there is a calculation of the energy needed to melt one kilogram of ice at 0°C and warm it to body temperature. Our university libraries have not seen fit to acquire this pedagogical work, but I found it excerpted in my copy of Kask and Rawn's General Chemistry, p. 439 (also neglected by our libraries), as a 2/3-page box labeled ``Applications of Chemistry 11.1''). To summarize the box, it takes about 1.2 × 10<sup>5</sup> calories. Someone must have thought this was a big deal: the box is titled ``The Dangers of Eating Snow for Emergency Water.'' I thought it was going to be about pollutants or albino dogs or something. ``Fortunately, there are several simple ways to get your water from snow and conserve valuable calories so that you do not freeze to death. As part of their car winter emergency kit, some people carry a candle and a metal container such as an empty coffee can in which they can melt and warm the snow.'' Or you could try one of the techniques enumerated in one of the earlier paragraphs of our Veep entry.

Also, for those thinking of putting emergency candles in the car this Winter, where they will be forgotten and melt next Summer (and spoil the water purification tablets), I have an alternate suggestion: emergency candies. For example, one (1) Twix-brand chocolate-covered cookie bar, about the size and shape of a candle but without the wick, provides 1.4 × 10⁵ calories, more than canceling out the calorie cost of a liter of water and providing needed proteins as well. Okay, Twix cookies also melt, assuming you really forget them. You could substitute M&M's or something, but you'll have to do that calculation yourself. I've already done so much research for this part of the entry that I'm about to burst a button somewhere.

Look, if you haven't got the joke yet, I have another suggestion. Turn DeLorenzo's warning around and you have DeLorenzo's golden diet recommendation. If you want to lose weight, don't just eat low-calorie foods, eat negative-calorie foods: ice cubes! Yes: one barely-frozen ice cube, with a volume of, say, 8 cc, costs over 900 calories to warm and bring to room temperature. Compare this to a typical diet of 2000 or 2500 Calories, and you can see how, with just a few cubes (about 2137 or 2671, to be otiosely precise), you can wipe out your calorie Consumption as well as your ability to taste food.

Calories beyond medical help

Herschel had been observing the Sun through various colored filters, and noticed that filters of different colors passed different amounts of heat, and this led him to do interesting experiments that he reported in 1800. Using a prism-and-thermometer set-up, he measured the heating caused by different spectral colors, and found greater heating with increasing wavelength (i.e., increasing from violet to red). He found that the greatest heating occurred in the region just beyond red. [This is an accident of the exprimental set-up, in which greater heating can be caused by greater absorption or by greater concentration of the light spectrum (if the index of refraction inside the prism varies more slowly, or by simple geometric effects); for the solar spectrum, the energy per unit wavelength actually peaks around green.]

This was the first demonstration of light not visible to the eyes. Herschel went on to demonstrate that rays of this light could be reflected, refracted, absorbed, and transmitted as visible light could. (Of course, these facts were implicitly assumed in the original experimental operation.) Just the next year, 1801, Johann Wilhelm Ritter announced the discovery of invisible light on the other side of the visible light spectrum -- what we now call ultraviolet light. These didn't seem to have a direct heating effect, but he observed that they promote certain chemical reactions.

If anything about modern European languages can go without saying, it is that their vocabularies were all enormously influenced by Latin. In the areas that were dominated by Western Christianity, the influence was widespread not only among elites but directly at all levels of society, and there was correspondingly greater wholesale direct adoption of Latin words. The German language, or more precisely the various German languages, did follow this general pattern, and German today has a large number of naturalized Latin words, particularly in the language of the intellect and the traditional crafts, trades, and agriculture.

However, German is unusual: not only did it not absorb as much Latin as, say, Slavic languages that had a weaker direct exposure to the Roman Empire, German went further and replaced a number of Latin loans with calques. (The Académie Française -- the official arbiter of the French language -- would like to do that today with the language of the American empire.) The phenomenon was driven by a movement of mystics that arose in the fourteenth century, centered in the Rhineland; most prominent among these were Meister Eckhard (Johannes Eckhard, c. 1260-1327) and his pupils. These mystics preached and wrote in Latin and in a German filled with calques of Latin words. Their innovation was influential both directly and indirectly. The indirect influence consists mainly in the fact that Luther followed their lead, using their calques in his Bible translation. In those days German (like English, Spanish, and other languages spoken over broad areas) consisted of a very variable range of dialects. The choices made by Luther in his translation of the Bible established a de facto standard for German, and played a role in German similar to the works of Shakespeare in English. A good traditional source on the history of the German language is Adolf Bach: Geschichte der deutschen Sprache.

It should be recognized that the Reformation (and Counter-Reformation) involved a number of related developments in language, government, and religion. The Roman Catholic Church had not authorized published translations of the Bible into various vernaculars, so the Reformation brought not only a reform of religion but also, with official translations of the Bible, changes in language status. The translations required increased attention to local language and began the establishment of national languages, usually based more or less closely on the prestige dialect spoken in the national capital.

(Concerning Bibles and language, it's worth noting that the King James version of the Bible was produced during the time that Shakespeare was active. This has led to speculation that he was a member of one of the mostly anonymous committees of translators, writers and editors who worked on it. There's also a place in the King James translation where some information about the bard can be ``decoded,'' but it's not statistically significant, from what I recall. Vide KJV.)

Another example of calque is the Hebrew shen-ha'ari, meaning `tooth of lion.' [The definite article ha in this position more-or-less puts the noun it determines in genitive case. A translation using an attributive noun</