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...)

Here's something less recent, from Flamm O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds (1939):

Excellent, remarked Mr. Furriskey with that quiet smile which endeared him to everyone who happened to come his way, but do not overlook this, that the velocity of light in vacuo is 186,325 miles per second.

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!

Here's something I hadn't realized: Canada is a part of Europe! In this online TNR article, editor-in-chief Martin Peretz explains ``Europe (by which I mean Great Britain, France, Germany, Holland, Denmark, the Czech Republic, Poland, Canada, Australia, and a few others) holds the fate of Palestine in its hands.'' There you go. His magazine is owned by a Canadian company, so I figure he ought to know. Australia is part of Europe too.

Also from the news media: Canada is a part of the US. Or so it seemed for a while in January 2009. For the incontrovertible evidence, you could visit the Financial Times page of World New Headlines, as I did. In the left sidebar, under ``World,'' I clicked on ``US.'' There I found an alphabetized list of US categories:

So at least part of the US is part of Europe too. Possibly not Hawaii, though. This is really almost as stupid as the new ESPN homepage unveiled at the beginning of January. Checking the next month, I see that the US category has been renamed ``US & Canada,'' and Canada has been moved to the end of the list. What about Mexico? Isn't Mexico a part of the US? President Polk sure thought so. The ESPN page has been somewhat repaired as well.

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.

... The FDIC is concerned that readers of the Bank Rate Monitor's Internet site may mistakenly believe that the Bank Rate Monitor's CAEL system reflects actual FDIC CAEL ratings.

Bankers and other members of the public should be aware that depository institution ratings in the "Safe and Sound Bank and Thrift Rating System" on the Bank Rate Monitor's Internet site are not based on, and should not be confused with, the FDIC's CAEL system. The FDIC does not endorse the ratings of the Bank Rate Monitor, nor does the FDIC necessarily agree with the ratings assigned by the Bank Rate Monitor.

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.

Anyway, a county gets a cut if you live in it or if you work in it, and those two cuts can be different. The county income tax calculation is part of the state income tax filing, and you add it all up and send it to the state. You also have to list which school district you live in. When a married couple that files jointly works in two or more different counties and lives together in a third, it gets so complicated that they usually get divorced to avoid the paperwork. Just kidding; they shoot themselves.

``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.

The idea of calibration can be applied even when the measurement is qualitative rather than quantitative, and when the instrument is a person's judgment. For example, on November 21, 2008, the Wall Street Journal's Opinion page contained a column recounting an interview with Bhutan's first elected prime minister, Jigme Y. Thinley. The interviewer and author of the column gushed that Mr. Thinley ``studied in the U.S., and his English is so articulate that it borders on poetic.'' Setting aside the possible objection that poetry is not exactly the apotheosis of articulateness, one may still wonder about the accuracy of the general positive judgment of PM Thinley's English. Happily, the column contains specimens of it, so one may judge directly, and the column is written in English, so one may perform an independent calibration of the instrument herself.

Here is an example of the instrument's English: ``But the election, comprising of two parties with fairly similar agendas, was remarkably peaceful.'' The column ends by showcasing a sample of the PM's English: ``the individual himself and herself must pursue happiness.''

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 with wavelength at longer wavelengths, 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 -- `lion tooth' -- is also fair.] The Hebrew term is calqued from the French dent de lion. English, as usual, simply borrows the word with slight spelling and greater pronunciation changes, in this case to dandelion.

The Hebrew word ari in the previous paragraph should be recognizable: the Biblical name Ariel means `Lion of God.'

A more systematic and extensive, though trivial, instance of calque is the translation of organic chemistry and SI terminology.

1985. tiny fish: Computer-Aided Logistic Support.
1988. small fish: Computer-aided Acquisition and Logistic Support.
1993. medium fish: Continuous Acquisition and Life-cycle.
1994. large fish: Commerce At Light Speed.

ADsorption, not ABsorption.

The O'Reilly perl book is sometimes called ``the camel.''

The surname Oliphant might be supposed to stand for elephant, but in fact it may stand for camel. Many family names arose from locales, and some locales were most easily identified by the prominent sign of a pub. Pubs bore simple, easily identified illustrations (like ``Cock and Bull,'' at the most felicitously named public establishments) for the convenience of otherwise valued but illiterate, or possibly extremely inebriated, patrons. Some pubs were named after exotic animals like camels. However, if one accepts the premise that illiterate persons at the dawn of surnamehood might wish to patronize a pub, then the possibility must be entertained that persons with a limited education might misidentify the simple, easily identified et cetera. In this way, I've read, some persons living in the neighborhood of pubs identified by the sign of the camel came to be named Oliphant. After all, who would name a pub ``The Elephant''? (Don't answer that; it's a rhetorical question. Just shut up and lemme finish.) Anyway, se non e vero, e ben trovato.

Excavations of ancient animal bones at Tel Jemmeh [ftnt. 34] (once a crossroads near Gaza) indicate that camel caravans were not used in the area until around 600 BCE. On the evidence of Genesis 24 (describing a trip by Abraham's servant) and the story of the visit of the Queen of Sheba to Solomon, it is clear that camels visiting Palestine until that time did not die locally, but waited until they had left.

Another book with a cheap binding is Wheelock's Latin. As with Wolfram's Mathematica book, a more expensive and durable hardcover is available.

They say that a camel is a horse designed by a committee. Blended departments like this are created by university administrators to, um, achieve greater interdisciplinarity and efficiency, and maybe find a way to reduce spending on and hiring for disciplines that are no longer valued, that's the word, quite as much as they once were. Anyway, the ANU used to have a Classics Department; now mail should be directed to the Classics Program, School of Language Studies.

[Normally we wouldn't put that last comment in parentheses, but we didn't want to make this entry confusing. You know -- mathphobia. Boo!]

You think it's bad to go bald? Just imagine if you had as many as five stumpy little lumps growing out of the top of your head.

Captious lexicographers insist that since the word was originally camélopard in French, the spelling ``cameleopard'' and the ``vulgar'' pronunciation ``camel-leopard'' are wrong. Not me. It isn't wrong, it's calque.

It's not clear what was in the original material, but over the course of centuries silk, Angora goat, wool, cotton, and linen have all been used in (or claimed to be in) the imported material or the domestic (European) imitation.

Presumably the Camelot of English folk history -- the Castle of King Arthur's Court, World Class Round Table Knights Centre -- is the same word, possibly through the association with luxury. In late nineteenth-century France, the Camelots du roi were what we might today call operations people (``bodyguards'' and spies) for La Ligue d'Action Française. Man, that looks like it would be pretty tough to translate into a known language. Whatever the name meant, the group itself was the most extremely monarchialist (Bourbon restorationist) group of significance. Hey, you know what? We've got some more bits of French history in this glossary. Look under Charles Bullion. Also, some Camelot characters star in the courtly love entry.

According to Kehlogg Albran,

It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle if it is lightly greased.

You're probably on pins and needles wondering who Kehlogg Albran is. You can learn more of his work at the fate entry, which features a picture of camels.

Cf. the Japanese word kami, discussed under the kamikaze entry.

Not ``straight-jacket,'' okay?

This just in: Jonathan Harris, the actor who played the greedy, pusillanimous, and otherwise no-good ``Dr. Zachary Smith'' on that TV series, dead at 87, Sunday, November 3, 2002. He died while receiving treatment for a chronic back problem. Another character in that show was B-9.

To read about how I didn't visit Naples (or Campania) once, kindly take a trip to the ID entry.

We pass along here some news that as of 1997.7.14 had not made it into the web site, that I could see, though they were announced that day on the Classics list. Robert M. Wilhelm, Exec. Dir., announced

two Special Programs for the Blind and Visually-Impaired:

A special program designed especially for the blind and visually impaired which will include the followings sites:

• NEW YORK: Metropolitan Museum of Art, St. Patrick's Cathedral, The Cloisters, Cathedral of St. John the Divine, The Museum of Modern Art, Ellis Island and Statue of Liberty.
• BALTIMORE: Walter's Art Gallery.
• WASHINGTON: National Gallery, American Museum of History, Capitol, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, National Cathedral, Arlington Cemetery, Monticello, Library of Congress.

For details and itinerary contact:

This program has been designed especially of the Blind and Visually-Impaired. Tactile experiences and hands-on opportunities are a special feature of this unique program. Family members and friends of the Blind are welcome of participate in this program. This program will be limited to 16 participants. For details and itinerary contact:

I guess this is a bit out of date, but maybe they'll do it again.

CAMWS publishes The Classical Journal (CJ). You wouldn't have imagined that was a unique journal title, but it apparently is in English.

``Middle West and South'' in the organization name is taken to extend (in the North) ``east as far as Ohio, South from Virginia, West to Utah and Arizona and North into the Canadian Provinces of Ontario, Manitoba and Saskatchewan'' (and they mean it -- the 2001 annual meeting was April 19-21 in Provo, Utah). For other, even more expansive definitions of the midwest, see the entry for MWSCAS.

Tell me when I'm ``done'' so I can roll over.

"Taking Lives" has been shooting in Montreal while "Paycheck"'s schedule was in Vancouver. Although both cities are in Canada, this is the equivalent of filming in Los Angeles and New York at the same time.

Hey, we're not going to waste your time with unimportant information! See the .se entry (Sweden) for more don't-know-much-about-geography piffle.

See the BNA entry for an earlier usage of the word Canada.

Existing treatments are pretty crude. They consist primarily in destroying the cancerous tissue by irradiation or chemical poisoning (chemotherapy or ``chemo''), and surgery. Cancerous tissue is targeted on the basis of its greater metabolic and reproductive rate, and the substances it consumes disproportionately as a result.

Many years ago, when there were no treatments and little hope of recovery, the name of ``cancer'' was spoken only in whispers; it was never mentioned on the broadcast media.

Many of the colored cause ribbons that have become popular refer to cancer or cancers. Here are some of the cancers with their assigned ribbon colors (according to this color code listing from 2004):

cancer	ribbon color	Comments
melanoma	black	Good choice.
colorectal cancer	brown	Too graphically appropriate.
multiple myeloma	burgundy	This is what happens when you delay.
childhood cancer	gold	There probably isn't any good color here.
brain cancer	gray	This is clever, but they should give it a slight pinkish or brownish hue.
ovarian cancer	green	?

Hey waitasecond -- isn't that French for song? Oh well, close.

John Aristotle Phillips visited India afterwards and inspected not only the plant but the contract under which the plant was built. That included special provisions intended to prevent use of the plant for nonpeaceful purposes [Canada is a signatory of the nuclear nonproliferation treaty (NPT).] Phillips learned, however, that India had exploited a loophole in the contract: India used the reactor to enrich its own thorium (Th) material.

[John A. Phillips is best known for submitting plans for an atomic bomb as his Junior Paper -- a standard requirement for physics undergraduates at Princeton (PU). He researched the project without any security clearance, but his paper was not returned because it ended up containing information that was considered classified. I've forgotten the precise details; he tells that story in Mushroom: the Story of the A-bomb Kid. The visit to India came later. It's not in the book; I heard about it from a friend of mine at the New Delhi Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses who met him there. Around 1980, Phillips co-founded a company called Aristotle Publishing, which provides campaign-management software to political candidates. That company has been renamed Aristotle and will focus on web-based fund-raising tools. Aristotle has venture capital from the market research firm Odyssey, but it's not all ancient Greek: the Nasdaq ticker symbol VOTE has been reserved in anticipation of a public offering. In 1998, $125,000 was raised online, about $70,000 of that by Jesse Ventura. On February 4, 2000, the day after John McCain won the New Hampshire primary by nineteen points over George W. Bush, his campaign raised between a half a million and a million dollars online. As of 2008, the typical numbers have gone up by a factor of ten.]

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It is fortunate that he did something original that we can attach his name to. Specifically, he discovered that benzaldehyde reacted with potassium hydroxide in a reaction producing benzoic acid and benzyl alcohol. You can get the original article from the library -- just go to Ann. I mean, check with Justus Liebigs Annalen der Chemie, vol. 88, pp. 129-30 (1853), and vol. 90, pp. 252-4 (1854). This reaction is a specific case of

                   _            _
        2RCHO  + OH  -----> RCOO  + RCH OH
                                       2

Okay, technically, the product does not include the acid RCOOH but its conjugate base. On a quick glance, this looks like an acid-base reaction (strong base to weak base: OH^- to carboxylic anion); it is actually a redox reaction (specifically a disproportionation). The name ``Cannizzaro reaction'' is now applied generally to the reaction given above (where R has no alpha hydrogen).

Historically, ordinary rapeseed oil has for the most part not been for internal consumption. Originally used for lamps in Asia and Europe, rape has been grown in Europe since the thirteenth century. In the nineteenth century it was used as a lubricant in steam engines. It was also used as a cooking oil, but it had a bitter taste. Reducing the acid and the glucosin (a toxin) have dramatically increased the economical value of rapeseed: canola is promoted as high in monounsaturated fatty acids, and the rapeseed meal is an economic livestock feed.

Check the canola entry in the alt.english.usage FAQ before you buy any of the competing dictionary etymologies for canola.

I know, I know: the capitalization raises the expectation that TEST is itself a backronym (backorpheme?) standing for as many as four or more words. This is a revelation to me. I mean, this is the first time I've ever found the ``as many as ... or more'' locution less than completely pointless. Anyway, no ulterior expansion seems to be given. There are contrary signs, moreover. A message above the quoted explanation informs the Francophone reader that ``(Les renseignements au sujet du CanTest [note dearth of caps] sont disponibles en anglais seulement).''

There is also a link to something called TESTCan that is offered by l'Institut des langues officielles et du bilinguisme (ILOB) at the (and let me say that I'm always relieved when I don't have to enter diacriticals) Université d'Ottawa. Le TESTCan est le ``Test de français ... pour les étudiant(e)s et les stagiaires au Canada administré par l'Université d'Ottawa [qui] a lieu trois fois par année.'' Never mind what this means; I doubt they managed, or even tried very hard, to make a French backronym of TEST. If I had achieved back-to-back English and French backronyms, they'd be in <font size="+10"> at the top of every webpage.

So to summarize our findings so far, CanTEST is an English-language test (remember this for later). Its name conforms to a small but representative subset of English-language naming conventions, such as that modifiers generally precede the noun they modify. TESTCan is a French-language test (remember this for later). Its name conforms to a small but representative subset of French-language naming conventions, such as that a modifier usually follows the noun it modifies. I don't doubt that this is intended to make the greatest number of people happy. It is very useful, even for a rabid Angloimperialist like me. I learned the new French word test (masc.). I think I'll remember it. This is even easier than learning Japanese garaigo. (The link isn't dead; it hasn't come to life yet. Gairaigo are words borrowed from languages like English. Especially English.)

All this symmetry is very wonderful, but confusion can result. Above the French-language description of the French-language test, there is a parenthetical phrase like the one discussed earlier. It reads ``(The information about the TestCan is available in English only).'' There are some problems with this translation. The first is that it is manifestly false, since le TestCan (or at least le TESTCan) is described in French immediately below the parenthetical. It seems that one of two bad things has happened.

1. One possibility is that the supplier of the parenthetical remark thought that what the French page needed was an English translation of the French remark on the English page. This person proceeded further to treat TestCan as a translation of CanTest. I imagine that it (the test) is not, and certainly the word is not. TestCan is a French test, not the French name of the English test, and even less the English translation of the French name for the English test (i.e., the English name of the English test -- which, by assumption, would have been what was wanted). A proper translation would have been ``(Information about the CanTest is available in English only).'' This would at least have been correct, though of little use to the non-Francophone who has somehow mistakenly stumbled into the French-language page about the French language exam.
2. Another possibility, and at this point I'm not prepared to dismiss it out of hand, is that the correct and relevant parenthetical was prepared in French. Its translation would have been ``(Information about the TestCan is available only in French),'' but somehow the French word français was translated into the English word `English.' Maybe it just seemed fair and symmetric, or perhaps the translator thought he was told to ``translate the `French' into `English','' or French words to that effect, and decided to go ahead and do so.

None of this would have happened if the English and French departments had simply stayed out of each other's way. If you're still reading, go on to the RevCan entry.

In Spanish, a language not unknown in the Caribbean, canto means `I sing.' In many languages, canto means `canto.'

Quicklime is prepared by heating limestone. (Breaking it up a bit first helps speed the process.) Limestone is essentially microcrystalline calcium carbonate (CaCO₃), from the point of view of a physicist or chemist, or a sedimentary form of calcite, from a the point of view of a geologist or mineralogist. The reaction to quicklime goes thus:

CaCO3 (s) + heat --> CaO + CO2 (g)

Podesta stressed that the think tank was not an organ of the Democratic Party. Rather, he pledged that American Progress would offer its voice and ideas to any policy maker or party that would have them. It was obvious that he wanted the center to be seen as an insurgent force in politics, beholden to no one, although it was difficult to imagine who besides the Democrats would stand to benefit from a revitalized liberal agenda. (Presumably Podesta isn't raising $50 million in order to take over the Green Party.)

With all the foredoomed campaign finance reforms that swirl around, political parties, think tanks, PAC's and all the rest are like shells in a shell game. I think Dick whatsisname, the disgraced triangulation guy, explained that CAP is one of the institutions that the Clintonites are making so they have a power base when Howard Dean takes over the Democratic Party in 2004 and ousts them. According to Bai, Podesta is trying to steer clear of the left-vs.-center contention. A different battle is between those who think the Democratic Party's problem is putting its ideas across and those who think the party needs to come up with ideas to put across. Podesta is firmly in the second camp. (This entry was written as Howard Dean's star was rising in 2003, and Dick Morris's comment reflected the assumption that Dean would win the party's nomination. His campaign imploded in time for the Iowa caucuses, yet by the end of 2004 he had taken a clear lead in the race for DNC chair. This time his lead didn't evaporate in January.)

The site has rather asinine URL's.

``The Flying Nun,'' a popular TV series of the early '60's starring Sally Field, was based on The Fifteenth Pelican by Tere Rios. Rios, a Madison, Wisconsin housewife and novelist, was a former pilot in the Georgia Civil Air Patrol.

the Princeton marching band detached itself into lines to form letters and spell out certain words, while a scripted commentary was read over the loudspeakers. While playing ``Stars and Stripes Forever,'' the band formed the letters C-A-P, with one part of the band organized as a floating ``R.'' The commentator announced, ``The Princeton University Band takes a long `harding' look at concerned alumni.'' The trouble that CAP finds at Princeton, the commentator continued, really ``comes from the pen of T. Harding Jones, a self-appointed theologian, philosopher, campus politico, sociologist, lawyer, and Great Right Hope. The band now gives CAP a right-handed compliment.'' At this point the ``R,'' after trying to move between the ``A' and the ``P,'' finally settled in between the ``C'' and the ``A.'' The band next paid tribute to Shelby Cullom Davis, who, the commentator said, supports ``the students' favorite comic book, Prospect magazine.''

Starting in October 1972, the group published a magazine called The Prospect. Bradley was a member of the magazine's board and caused a stir when he resigned in protest following the first one or two issues.

Of little political significance, but I'm gonna tell you 'bout it anyway, is the resonance of the word Prospect. Prospect is a street running north from the Washington Road side of campus. The Woodrow Wilson School is at the NW corner of Washington and Prospect, and the Engineering buildings are hidden further away in the same quadrant. Prospect has many large old mansions that belong to ``eating clubs,'' essentially the Princeton version of fraternities. (Fraternities and secret societies were banned from campus in the middle of the nineteenth century. They were allowed back some time in the 1980's, and I remember that at least one fraternity started a chapter before 1984.) For many years there was a Prospect Club also. Eating clubs are considered one of the unique features of Princeton's undergraduate experience, though maybe they are a bug. In any case, most Princeton traditionalists cherish this as a part of what makes Princeton-as-it-used-to-be so wonderful.

CAP petered out of existence around 1986 or maybe 1987. It soared to prominence at the end of 2005 because Samuel Alito ('72) had listed his CAP membership in a 1985 application for a political appointment in the Reagan administration's Department of Justice. In 2005, Alito was undergoing the usual trial-by-ordeal required of all US Supreme Court Justice nominees, and stated (lookit me: I'm a journalist!) that he did not recall being a member until he was reminded (in 2005) by the disclosure of his 1985 application. He did remember that Princeton had expelled his ROTC from campus during his junior year and that he had to go to Trenton State College to finish his ROTC classes. He supposed in 2005 that his opinion of the ROTC expulsion might have been part of what led him to join CAP in 1972. No one ever turned up who could remember his having been a member. Records of the group give no indication that he played an active role in it. Back up: records of the group existed twenty years later!

Another early member was Bill Bradley ('65), a Princeton Tigers basketball star who had gone on to a professional basketball career with the New York Knicks, and who later served as a US Senator from New Jersey (1979 to 1996 legislative seasons). He quit CAP in 1973. In 1978 I attended a rock concert at Livingston College (part of Rutgers University) that was a campaign fund-raiser for Bill Bradley. The acts that I remember were the Blues Brothers and Patti Smith. It was an indoor event and the acoustics were terrible. (Either that, or Patti Smith couldn't sing.)

There is a great deal of disagreement on the precise explicit positions taken by CAP, if any. It is claimed that it was in some way or another opposed to coeducation (although the first women had already been admitted to the undergraduate college in 1969), or that it was opposed to race-based affirmative action in admissions, but that it favored traditional admissions and financial-aid favoritism for athletes and alumni children. Alito was confirmed; I can't be bothered to pursue this any more.

A long obituary of Ken Caminiti appeared in the San Diego Union-Tribune (October 31, 2004; p. C-1) and mentioned a story his mother Yvonne used to tell ``of how Kenny, at age 2 1/2, decided he was Batman and tried to `fly' down the stairs.'' He took a lot of risks, and he usually survived.

This map will help you get to the building.

I have been asked: for advancement in what direction?

Forward, of course!

I'm surprised everyone doesn't support the progressive movement.

CAPS is located in the Arizona State University Research Park.''

This is a good links site from among the alternative medicine pages for Trigeminal Neuralgia. Here's an introduction to the unique chemistry of capsaicin, and some more detail. Here's a general description from the epicurious dictionary.

The CAPTCHA acronym incorporates the term ``Turing test'' in the loose sense of a test to distinguish humans from machines, and not in the strict sense of the relatively unstructured test originally proposed by Alan Turing. The usual problem with such Turing tests is not that computers can pass them, but that humans may not. There's actually an annual event where the Turing test in its original form is implemented. Communicating (in English) via keyboard in wide-ranging discussions lasting a few minutes, human judges try to distinguish the humans from the computers among their interlocutors. So far no program has convinced the judges that it is human, but some humans have been mistaken for computer programs.

In principle, a CAPTCHA need not be text-based. A CAPTCHA might generate other sorts of tests than distorted-text recognitions to distinguish humans from bots, but text-based tests are still the most common.

You gotta problem widdat? We ain't talkin' geology here.

Often paired with carping, but not in the sense of fishing for carp. Cf. Carp.

Back in the 1960's, I leafed through a silly paperback with fanciful cartoon pictures inspired by puns on the car syllable. A slow vehicle called Es-car-got, a scary one named Boris Car-loff, that sort of thing. I don't know -- the constellation name Carina puts me in mind of an ocarina or PCP.

I propose that the CAR find someone named Burator and make him president. I mean, what could possibly go wrong that hasn't already gone wrong?

They're also pretty good at detecting late-night silence in residential areas.

When someone is trying to break into a car with a car alarm, people walk by and say things like ``poor sucker can't get his alarm turned off.'' Eventually someone calls the police, who help get the alarm turned off and say responsible law-enforcement-type things like ``take it to your dealer and have that thing adjusted.''

Actress Roz Kelly is best known for her role as Fonzie's aggressive biker girlfriend Pinky Tuscadero in the 1973-84 television series ``Happy Days.'' In 1998 she joined the ranks of Henry David Thoreau and Martin Luther King, Jr., spending time in jail for making a symbolic protest (that happened to involve a gun). After being awakened repeatedly by a car alarm in late November of that year, she armed herself with a 12-gauge Winchester shotgun and fired into two cars and a neighbor's empty apartment. She was eventually sentenced to three years' probation.

Carat is also Commonwealth spelling for another unit of measure of precious value -- gold purity -- which in the US is written karat.

Diamond mass is sometimes measured in hundredths of a carat, called points.

The word carat comes from the Arabic word qirat for the seed of the coral tree. Another seed that became a unit of measure was the barleycorn (one third of an inch). However, the old folk songs about John Barleycorn refer to beer, which is traditionally brewed from fermented barley (though this is not necessary). The rock group Traffic recorded an arrangement of one of these songs, ``John Barleycorn Must Die,'' in the late sixties or early seventies.

Of course, the most common seed word to be an official unit of measure is the grain (gr.).

The name ``hydrocarbons'' is often mistakenly used in place of carbohydrates. Hydrocarbons are all those compounds which contain only hydrogen and carbon, but carbohydrates contain oxygen as well. In semiconductors, the confusion is institutionalized as a conventional meaning (vide THC), just like the conventional meanings of ``cholesterol'' in medicine, ``rare earth'' (see RE entry specifically) in geology, and ``metal'' by astronomers.

That Immanuel Velikovsky confused carbohydrate and hydrocarbon was one of the more minor points lodged against the theories advanced in his best sellers Worlds in Collision and Earth in Upheaval. So if you hope to launch a daft new theory and cult, or even if you only want to nurse a persecution complex, be sure to get these two terms straight.

The three main bulk nutrients are protein, fat, and carbohydrates. Notice that carbohydrates are the only group not referred to by a singular-form mass noun.

The term carborundum was coined by the inventor Acheson. I don't know what he had in mind, but it seems very likely he wanted to evoke the term corundum (only inferior in hardness to diamond and carborundum itself, among industrial abrasives then available). The substitution of carbo- for co- would indicate the carbon component (it's made by burning sand and coke together; sounds like a great premise for a chimera movie genre -- beach blanket tales from the crypt).

Get oriented at the Mohs's Hardness Scale entry.

    H--O
        \
         \
          C==O
         /
        /

The hydrogen from this group typically has a high dissociation constant, so molecules containing the group are acids (called ``carboxylic acids'') by the Arrhenius definition (and hence by all accepted definitions). When people say ``organic acid,'' they usually mean carboxylic acid. This saves a syllable at a small cost in precision, since most organic acids of interest, and among these most of the strong ones, are carboxylic acids.

Carboxylic acids form salts in the usual way that acids do. In addition, carboxylic acids react with alcohols to form esters:

                 RCOOH        +     R'OH    -->   RCOOR'  +   H O
                                                               2

            carboxylic acid       alcohol         ester      water

In principle, a molecule with two carboxyl groups is a diprotic acid, but it's an interesting case. Normally in a polyprotic acid, each successive hydrogen ionization is harder. In other words, the dissociation constant for the first proton is higher than for the second, and so forth. For a large organic molecule with two well-separated carboxyl groups, however, the ionizations should be essentially independent.

Now just to set things up and give you the big picture orientation: Libraries used to contain books, because no one else would have them and it seemed a shame to discard them. (Okay, that's just a guess, but there's supporting evidence in the fact that as of 2006, libraries still contain books. Check 'em out!) These books are usually in codex form: printed on separate sheets of paper that are bound together along one edge.

[Usually codices but not always. Old Fine Hall at Princeton (a fine old hall where Einstein once had an office) houses the East Asian Studies department and its excellent collection of old Chinese books, mostly (okay, I only checked a couple of the book boxes, so I'm extrapolating) in the form of scrolls. One of my neighbors my first year in the NGC was a graduate student from Hong Kong who was studying Chinese literature. At some point, I remarked that I wouldn't have expected the US to be the place to go to study Chinese literature. He explained that the best collections of old Chinese literature were in Europe, because of all the stuff the Europeans took when they controlled China, and that the best place to study was the US, because the European collections were closed-stack, and American philanthropists had bought many European collections and donated them to American universities.

It's been over 25 years since he told me this, so things may have changed. He was also bitter about the script modification adopted in the PRC, which has been promoted as a way to simplify writing and help increase literacy. His beef was that it made young Chinese effectively illiterate: unable to read the old literature. Script reform as effective censorship of the past -- why didn't I think of that? From periodic complaints I hear, it seems that unhappiness with the script reform persists in Taiwan.]

The main or ultimate topic of this entry (the card catalog) is one we should wade carefully into; there may be hidden shallows in this deep topic, so an impatient dive could be disastrous. Let's start with a poem quoted before the preface of Soule's book:

BOOKS

These are the masters who instruct us
without rods and ferules,
without hard word and anger,
without clothes or money.

If you approach them they are not asleep;
if investigating you interrogate them
they conceal nothing;
if you mistake them, they never grumble;
if you are ignorant they cannot laugh at you.

The library of wisdom, therefore,
is more precious than all riches,
and nothing that can be wished for
is worthy to be compared with it.

Whosoever, therefore, acknowledges himself
to be a zealous follower
of truth, of happiness,
of wisdom, of science,
or even of faith,
must of necessity make himself
a lover of books.

-- Richard de Bury, ``Philobiblon.''
(Written in 1344, first published in 1474).

``The first great principle in learning to use a library is to acquire the knack of saving time.'' -- W.W. Bishop

``A month in the laboratory can often save thirty minutes in the library'' -- proverb.

In Las Vegas, in order to avoid having the cards become too friendly with the customers, the card decks are retired frequently. At the MGM Grand and probably many others, they'll give you used decks to take home as souvenirs. They're marked, so you don't try to sneak them into a game, but they're identically marked, so you can use them in your own game.

Presumably, the name of this relief organization has influenced the use of ``care package'' to refer to a mailed gift of necessities, like a package of food from parents to child away at school.

The name comes from the original location of its offices: the cross-roads at the center of Oxford.

There was a Carfax Gallery, founded in 1898, that exhibited such artists as William Rothenstein (a co-founder of the gallery), Charles Conder, Walter Sickert, and Max Beerbohm. Robert Ross became involved with the gallery in 1901, and you can read about the Carfax Gallery in

• Maureen Borland: Wilde's Devoted Friend: A Life of Robert Ross (1990)
• Margery Ross, ed., Robert Ross: Friend of Friends (1952).

(I understand that there's a small imitation someplace not far from Oxford, in addition to the Ontario carhenge made from crushed cars. Catherine Yronwode tries to keep track of some of the most important tribute (physical) sites.)

That show was open to pretty much all vehicles, even though it was sponsored by the Michiana Mopar Association. (As you know, of course, Mopar sells aftermarket parts for Chrysler, Dodge, and Plymouth vehicles. When Chrysler Corporation bought AMC (before eventually being bought in its turn by Mercedes), it kept the Jeep line in production and also retagged the Eagle line and continued selling those for a couple of years. It turns out that Mopar carries parts for AMC in general.

On a flight once, I was seated next to an employee of one of the major auto parts retailers, like Advance Auto Parts or something. He was reading some internal company literature, and while he was in the bathroom, I learned that their marketing research had discovered that putting stores close together has an anti-intuitive benefit. If the stores have overlapping sales regions -- i.e., if they're close enough that some customers who go to one store could as easily go to the second store when it opens -- you might expect the new store to take business from the old store. But in practice, same-store sales at the older store generally increase after a new store opens nearby (presumably more than they might otherwise be expected to increase, if the market is growing). It's believed that people are just generally more aware of the company -- of both stores -- when two stores are advertising than when one is. If I had read further, I might have learned how close is too close (I think they were considering stores about five miles apart), but the wait to use the bathrooms wasn't that long. (I really appreciate all this insider information, of course, but I'd be happier if they seated me next to a babe who works in swimwear next time. Even happier if she travels in swimwear. Driving has its advantages. Once when I was driving cross-country, I had to get my car repaired in Houston; another customer at the shop was an attractive saleswoman for Johnson beauty products. It's no wonder the airlines are all going bankrupt: they can't figure out how to satisfy their customers' most basic needs!)

Another marketing issue is who exactly the aftermarket retailers' competition is -- i.e., what their potential customers' alternatives are. Patronizing a different company's store? Putting up with a ratty car? Visiting junkyards? Scrapping the car and buying a new one? If other retailers are the main competition, then where they don't exist the market might be saturated with a single store. Don't laugh: Once I interviewed for a job in little Athens, Nowhere (or maybe Athens, Ohio; actually both), and happened to mention Meineke Muffler shops. They didn't have muffler shops in Athens; they had auto repair shops. Glad I didn't get the job.

I mentioned the nearby-stores thing to Gary -- Don't ask me ``Gary who?'' If you'd been reading the glossary diligently you'd know that I don't say, and you'd also know who he is. -- and Gary told me about his dad. For a while when Gary was a kid, his dad had a furniture store. When they found out that another furniture store was, pardon the expression, moving in nearby on the same street, Gary asked his dad if that wouldn't be bad for business. His dad said it would be good, because it would help make their area the place where people would think of going to buy furniture. Eventually a big fire on that street put them out of business, and Gary's dad bought a gas station. Or maybe that was before, but it's interesting how stories line up. I visited the car show (the one sponsored by Michiana Mopar) with Robert (the carchaeologist -- remember?). Robert's dad used to distribute marketing materials to Getty gas stations.

Oh, alright -- I guess that some of you may have valid excuses for not already knowing this, so I'll give you a hint. Saul Bellow wrote a novella with the title Seize the Day. That's a very old expression.

``Carpe Diem'' was a song on the first Fugs album. It was a boring number -- the longest track (over five minutes), and the fewest distinct (in the sense of nonidentical) words: ``Carpe diem / Death is a-comin' in. [Repeat.]''

In 1995, Metallica came out with a song called ``Carpe Diem Baby.'' The only other place in this glossary where we have Metallica information as of this writing is also Latin-related. See Agricola.

Another apparent classical allusion in rock music is the title track of a 1981 AC/DC album: ``For Those About To Rock (We Salute You).'' This is presumably intended to evoke the famous salute to Claudius: Morituri te salutant. This is typically mistranslated or faithfully misquoted in English as `we who are about to die salute you.' AC/DC also gave their 1977 album the title ``Let There Be Rock.''

In the late 1980's, the New Mexico State football team went from being just bad to scraping the profundities of the haplessness barrel. They made #9 on this list of all-time worst college football teams, where it is reported that a new assistant coach, watching his first practice said, ``Lord have mercy on our souls.'' The Aggies finally ended their 27-game losing skid in a blow-out upset of the 105th-ranked Titans of Cal State Fullerton.

See, for example,
M. D. Levenson, Physics Today, 30, #5, p. 44 (May 1977);
A. B. Harvey, J. R. McDonald, and W. M. Tolles, Progress in Analytical Chemistry, p. 211 (New York: Plenum, 1977).

I've gotten used to the idea that social sciences are counted among the arts and sciences, but I never gave much thought to which. I realize now that I must unconsciously have classed them with the arts -- like metalworking and bricklaying. (As Sherlock Holmes pointed out -- when you've eliminated the impossible, then the truth must lie in whatever remains, no matter how improbable.) I noticed that Ball State (that's BS University now) has a College of Sciences and Humanities, and I thought: ``Cool -- they realized that these two belong together in a college separate from the social sciences!'' Eventually, I discovered that they had made the common error of regarding the social sciences as sciences. As if a fire dog were a breed of canine.

Okay, okay -- if you want to be fussy about it, `he [or she or it] hunts' is spelled caza. To 90% of Spanish-speakers, that's a homophone of (un homófono de) casa.

Oh, and, uh, it turns out that the two words that are not just homophones but homographs are related. The verb casar (`to marry') is derived from casa (`house'), in a development that might otherwise have yielded a verb meaning `to house.' Not to worry, though: casar also means `to nullify' and serves as a noun referring to the collection of houses constituting a village.

Casa Blanca and Casablanca are common place names in Spanish. The following list is just a sampling. It's taken largely from the Enciclopedia Universal Ilustrada and may be a little out of date, since the encyclopedia was published between about 1907 and 1930.

Chile:

Spain:

              Municipio        Provincia
              ---------        ---------
              Arboleas         Almería
              Denia            Alicante
              Félix            Canarias
              Letur            Albacete
              Lietor           Albacete
              Oñate            Guipúzcoa
              Vicar            Almería

There's a municipality of Casablanca in Columbia. According to the Diccionario Enciclopédico Planeta (1984): 274 km² and 7339 inhabitants. Primary enterprises: sugar cane and corn farming, forestry, and gold mining.

There's a town of Casablanca in Chile. According to the Diccionario Enciclopédico Planeta (1984): 955 km² and 12,314 inhabitants. A rich farming area in the fifth region of of Aconcagua.

There are neighborhoods (entidades de población) called Casablanca in many Spanish municipalities:

              Municipio               Provincia
              ---------               ---------
              Abarán                  Murcia
              Cospeito                Lugo
              Firgas                  Canarias
              Fuente Alamo            Murcia
              Lorenzana               Lugo
              San Carlos de la Rápita Tarragona

• As Time Goes By (on the music)
• hydrodynamics (on the waters)
• WGA (on the writing)
• Septimus (on what, I have no idea)

I'm looking for other colored executive mansions, and I'm having a hard time finding them. I did, however, discover directions explaining that the ``Capt. [James & Emma Holt] White House will be the yellow house on your left.'' It's in Alamance County, N.C. How far is that from Orange County, N.C.?

While you're stroking your chin and disheveling your beard, visit the Johnny Cash and Johnny Paycheck items under the Nomenclature is Destiny entry.

``Citizens'' sounds so burgherisch, so sober and responsible. Just the sort of ideas you associate with Las Vegas.

In 1986, the last time the APS held a meeting in Las Vegas (and it was the last time; hotels were appalled by our sobriety and other unwelcome virtues), I visited family in LA, rented a car and drove in. Caught in traffic, I saw a taxi beside and slightly ahead of me, nosing toward my lane like he wanted go ahead of me... and then he did the most outrageous, stupid, unexpected thing one could have imagined: he gave me the right of way and waited for me to pass. Confusion! Anger! He could have caused an accident! They should confiscate his medallion!

Rule of the road #1: DO WHAT IS EXPECTED OF YOU.

If you don't someone will be surprised and an accident is very likely. If you're driving a taxi, you should cut people off and turn without signaling.

Sheesh. Fortunately I was able to handle the emergency, and no one was hurt.

The principal requirement in a word that is a synonym of catarrh is that it not have any nasal consonants, so you can pronounce it when you've got it. The best thing about the word catarrh is that you can hawk up phlegm just by prolonging the second syllable.

You know, the word calibre, referring to gun-muzzle size, is a corruption of the word caliper, which one used to measure it with.

Gloss for those who, uh, don't remember:
It is recorded that Cato the Elder used to end all his speeches in the Roman Senate with that phrase, which meant `Carthage is [to be] destroyed.' Rome did destroy Carthage in the third Punic war, although the business about sowing the soil there with salt is now generally believed to be just a story invented later.

Cato the Younger was a partisan of Pompey against Julius Caesar, and committed suicide after the defeat of Pompey. This Cato's daughter Portia was married to Brutus, who also eventually opposed Julius Caesar.

You know, it's pretty unusual for an organization to get a name that is a sentence rather than a noun phrase. Verbs power strong language; I guess they're trying to make a powerful statement about a computer (no article; is ``Computer'' its name? how quaint!) that assisted tools for study. I guess that's it. Either that, or the stonecutter lacked a stencil for the hyphen, and the name is just an ordinary noun phrase about Computer-Assisted Tools further specified by a prepositional phrase.

``Computer-Assisted,'' as I believe I point out elsewhere, is a rather widely used term. One problem with hackneyed phrases is that their use becomes a bit unthought. For example, what exactly is a computer-assisted tool? We can gain some insight by considering analogous expressions, such as power-assisted steering. This is steering that works without (engine) power, but that works better with a power assist. Obviously, then, any computer-assisted tool exists independently of any computer, and can be used without a computer, but works better with a computer. That's why it's not called a computer-based tool, or software study tool. I'm going to think up some examples of computer-assisted tools real soon, in the interests of scholarship.

``[A] member-owned information organization serving producers in all segments of the cattle business. Cattle-Fax is a member-directed corporation, governed by a board of directors, elected from the membership. The staff of Cattle-Fax is comprised of [sic; they mean comprises] market analysts, research analysts, data collectors, an information services department and service personnel.''

That and more here. Really, there is no more accurate and complete compilation of the facts of cattle than the cattle themselves. Eventually, then, as they improve their operation, when you ask for detailed information about one of their beeves, they'll just send its genome description and some historical data to your phone, and a device on your end will clone a facsimile for your inspection.

• Hypertext of Catullus ``This has a very comprehensive body of texts in the original Latin.''
• William Harris's collection ``Text with comments'' organized by type and also available in standard order.
• Hypertext of Catullus in English, Latin, and Dutch ``This site has quite a few of the more famous carmina in English, Latin and Dutch.'' (This is the permanent location of the Catullus, Gaius Valerius Catullus site originally at <http://www.xs4all.nl/~negen/cat_ned.htm>.)
• Carmina Catulli ``This site has all poems in Latin, edited and corrected after Mynors's Oxford text of 1958, all in one file.''
• Catullus with Merrill's commentary at Roman Perseus ``Go to main site and down to the starting link or go directly.''

You should be careful pronouncing Catullus, that it doesn't sound like Catallus, the Roman army general. The error is unbelievably frequent. In fact, until Mark B. pointed it out, I had even spelled Catullus as Catallus above, making an oddly meaningless sentence.

1. Formal Cause
2. Material Cause
3. Efficient Cause
4. Final Cause

Final cause is purpose. Efficient cause is what we call cause in the sense of cause-and-effect; efficient cause is what we moderns think of as the determinant cause. Material cause is what a thing is made of. On 96.10.25 the Stammtisch considered the possibility that analytical chemists have Aristotle all wrong, but we went off on a tangent about saponification process [200] and Maimonides [613] before we could reach a firm conclusion.

Everyone mistakenly thinks of formal cause as ``name.'' Well, alright, not everyone, but I misunderstood for twenty-one years and nobody corrected me. The formal cause is really the identity of a thing in a fundamental sense -- related to Plato's ideal forms but inhering in the thing perceived, rather than in some thing outside the cave that is not directly perceived. For Ari, the formal cause is determining.

Okay now, some email input from an appropriate Stammtisch member allows me to raise the quality of discussion a notch: there are relationships among the causes...

In Metaphysics 1050a8, Aristotle wrote ``The initiating principle [arche] is that for the sake of which a process of becoming takes place, and this is always the end or goal [telos].'' Nearby he also writes ``Matter [hyle] exists in a potential state, just because it may attain to its form [eidos]; and when it exists actually, then it is in its form.''

As it happens, I can understand the meaning of these passages. The meaning of these passages is that it may require some study to understand Aristotle's philosophy.

If you have a library handy, you could see C. Cruz-Neira, D. J. Sandin, and T. A. DeFanti, ``Virtual Reality: The Design and Implementation of the CAVE,'' Proceedings of the SIGGRAPH '93 Computer Graphics Conference (ACM SIGGRAPH, August 1993), pp. 135-142.

On the other hand, if you have access to the internet, you can follow this link to Fakespace Systems Inc, which also markets RAVE.

CAVE requires viewers to wear special goggles; the illusion of depth is created by displaying distinct left- and right-eye images projected in linearly polarized light. (This causes a confusing double image if a viewer tilts his head.) Similar systems include NAVE and BNAVE.

Softwarehouse -- now there's a word.

A number of years ago, George Constantou was its head. His niece was property manager where I rented an apartment.

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

French Kings Louis XIII and XIV used to, uh, maybe this isn't appropriate for a family glossary.

According to ongoing research conducted by someone who once sat next to me on an AA flight (OKC to O'Hare), most people can't name twenty active football players. My suspicion is that most of the twenty active football players they can't name are linemen.

One barrier to the practical utilization of this biodegradation process is the fact that PCB's are hydrophobic (i.e., nonpolar, not water-soluble), whereas the bacteria live in moist sections of the soil. In order to accelerate the process, surfactants such as QS have been considered (see F. Fava, D. Di Gioia: ``Effects of Triton X-100 and Quillaya Saponin on the ex situ bioremediation of a chronically polychlorobiphenyl-contaminated soil,'' Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology, vol. 50, #5, pp 623-630 (1998)).

``[O]versees the collection of $1.00 per head on all cattle sold in the U.S. and $1.00 equivalent on imported cattle, beef and beef products and is responsible for approving the annual budget for its national checkoff-funded programs.''

(To talk back to As It Happens, email <aih@toronto.cbc.ca>).

I have seen the CBC described as the party organ of the Liberal Party. To the extent that parallels can be drawn, the Liberal Party of Canada corresponds to the Democratic Party of the US.

On January 22, 2008, the CBC sponsored a debate among candidates for the Democratic Presidential nomination, ahead of South Carolina's Democratic primary on January 26. Neil Young and the NHL, Mark Steyn and now this! We're being recolonized! Sound the alarm, it's... Oh, it's the Congressional Black Caucus, sponsoring a debate on MLK Day.

For our serious, solid-information-seeking glossary readers (at least the ones we haven't driven off): any actually useful link or content has been segregated in this CBCF entry.

This entry used to claim the CBE was the ``energy surface of the conduction band as a function of momentum coördinate.'' WHAT WAS I THINKING?! Mea culpa! Mea maxima culpa! Viewed in momentum space, the conduction band is all surface: at any point in momentum space (more precisely in the space of crystal momentum or quasimomentum), there is a discrete set of energies that an electron may have.

The CBE was founded in 1957, as the Conference of Biological Editors, by a joint action of the American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS) and the US government's National Science Foundation (NSF). The Conference was changed to Council some time between 1964 and 1972.

A major activity of the organization is the production of a style manual. Interestingly, or perhaps not so interestingly, while the issuing entity had Biology in its name, the manual's original title was Style Manual for Biological Journals. A case can be made for that, I suppose.

The sixth edition, published in 1994, broadened the scope of its style recommendations beyond biological disciplines (``microbial, plant, zoological, and medical sciences'' -- why not botanical and animal? why exclude clinical medical research?) to science generally. The cynical view (mine) is that this was a territorial encroachment, a power play, a bid to stick their noses in other people's business. An alternative and fashionable view is that science is rapidly becoming highly interdisciplinary. Interdisciplinarity is an occasionally useful idea because it gives people with money and a negligible knowledge of science the illusion of understanding. In fact, as any fool can see, specialization continues to increase. Interdisciplinarity takes the form of cooperation between specialists who understand each others' work only at a what-can-you-do-for-me level.

Whatever its virtues, the manual seems to be consulted primarily as an arbiter of the somewhat arbitrary conventions of citation. We're talking about scholarly or at least putatively scholarly research here. The most widely used citation style standards seem to be those of the MLA and the APA style manuals, with those of the CBE and University of Chicago style manuals in distant third and fourth places. On the other hand, the most widely used style manuals (as such) are probably the MLA, APA, and U. of Chicago, and fourth place would probably go to Kate L. Turabian's A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations. That's my impression, anyway. Outside of academia, I imagine that the most popular style manuals would be those of the University of Chicago, the AP, and the New York Times, in that order.

In 2000, six years after making its move with the style manual, CBE changed its name to the Council of Science Editors (CSE). As of 2007, there has not been another edition of the style manual, and its citation standards are still widely referred to as the CBE conventions/standards/whathaveyou. I suppose this will change when the CSE issues a new style manual.

Kristal soon discovered that there wasn't much of a market for more C, BG, or B in the city. The bar was in the Bowery, appropriately enough for what eventually became a trendy venue for the 1970's punk rock movement. (For most of the twentieth century, the Bowery was a blighted area. Jim Croce's ``You Don't Mess Around With Jim'' begins ``Uptown got its hustlers / Bowery got its bums.'')

CBGB's was still there as of August 2005, having dodged the landlord's attempt to evict it. However, the landlord, not exactly surprisingly, refused to renew the lease, and that expired in September 2005. Lawyers for Kristal managed to forestall the closing for a year, which shows how much you can do when you haven't a legal leg to stand on and everyone knows it. The club will closed Sunday, October 15, 2006. Hilly Kristal, still the owner after all those years, was 74 years old and battling lung cancer, but said he planned to reopen in Las Vegas.

See Sean Landis's pages.

See Sean Landis's pages.

China's Cultural Revolution was begun by Chairman Mao in 1966. In intention, it was something like one of the Great Awakenings that the US has experienced since the colonial era: it was meant to bolster religious belief. In China, the religion was an economic messianism called Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought. Unlike the Great Awakenings, participation in the Cultural Revolution was not optional. There were some other differences, such as the mortality rates, but I want to focus on an aspect relevant to this entry. That was this little thing we call the ``Down to the Countryside Movement,'' begun by Mao in December 1968, which continued for a decade. It wasn't a walk in the park. It was an involuntary ``movement,'' in this case of ``young intellectuals'' into the countryside, where they were educated by the peasants. The education consisted of learning what farm servitude was like, first hand. Most of the ``young intellectuals'' were recent college graduates, but some were not. A friend of mine told me some of his experience of this internal exile, begun before he finished high school. After some time, he got word from his mother of rumors that the Movement would soon be ended; she urged him to try to prepare for the college qualification exams. There were no useful textbooks available, but he and a couple of friends found an educated fellow who taught them whatever he could, which included mathematics to the calculus level. (When you spend a couple of decades exiling intellectuals to the sticks, you're bound to end up with some sharp sticks.) My friend did well enough on his exams to continue on to college.

This is very different from CBL, of course. But every experience can be a learning experience, so the fact normally goes without saying. When it doesn't go without saying -- whenever an intrinsically noneducational activity is explicitly labeled as learning or education -- it strongly suggests some dishonesty afoot. Okay, here's a CBL definition from a useful email: ``courses, often called service-learning, typically offer students opportunities to provide some meaningful service over an extended period of time that meets a need or goal that is defined by a community group or agency.''

Cf. CBR, EL. Uh-oh... namespace collision straight ahead!

This term dates from before widespread web use. It meant something like learning based on an educational computer program distributed on floppy disks. Nowadays it might mean googling for answers. I can't assign take-home exams any more, because any problem sufficiently simple to assign for an exam is liable to have an answer available somewhere on the web.

Did you say ``honor code''? Look, that might have been effective when cheating normally required the cooperation of a second person, typically drawn from a small pool of fellow students who had also pledged to follow the honor code. With the Internet, it effectively takes only one to tango, and the dance floor fills up fast.

More on promotional activities: After co-starring as Major Anya Amasova in ``The Spy Who Loved Me'' (1977), Barbara Bach kvetched about having had to kiss icky Roger Moore, who was old enough to be her father. (Not her exact words; I'm going from memory here, okay?) Moore, whose first movie role was as a soldier in a 1945 movie, was 50 at the time and is three years older than Sean Connery. In a 1996 interview, Moore said, ``I have a couple of projects that are simmering. One is a remake of a French film which is almost ready. All we need is to find a leading lady old enough to look as if she would be interested in being kissed by me.''

Barbara Goldbach was born August 27, 1947. (Not sure when the name changed -- maybe when she started modeling for the Ford Agency at age 16.) When she was 18 she married 29-year-old Augusto Gregorini. BB co-starred with Ringo Starr in a stupid movie called ``Caveman'' (1891; sorry, make that 1981 -- there weren't any pterodactyls in 1891). Starr (Richard Starkey) and she married on her thirty-fourth birthday (he was 40).

It was founded in 1996. The Stammtisch Beau Fleuve is a more venerable organization.

Since the CBO is ultimately controlled by the majority party in Congress, one might expect it to reflect a partisan bias in predicting future US economic performance (such predictions are needed for estimating tax revenues and public assistance expenses, for example). Nevertheless, over the years the accuracy of its predictions has compared favorably with that of nonpolitical agencies. Tentatively, I think this could conceivably perhaps possibly be taken, arguably at least, as demonstrating personal integrity.

The CBOE and the Amex compete with each other on most of the contracts they list. Exceptions include options on the Standard & Poor's 500 Index and some other benchmarks for which the CBOE has an exclusive license. On the other hand, the Amex offers S&P 500 depositary receipts, called ``Spiders,'' and other ``exchange-traded funds'' that track benchmarks. The Amex and other exchanges offer options on many ETF's, but no options market offers contracts on the Spiders.

I just looked around, and found another CBRC -- possibly the same one at a new URL. The site seems extremely bare, but I guess that's how we like it.

The CBS style is also used by a couple of former Dutch colonies. Indonesia, most of the former Dutch East Indies (including Dutch New Guinea, discussed at .do), had a Biro Pusat Statistik that goes by BPS (q.v.). This translates `Central Bureau of Statistics,' one of the names given on its English pages, though the official English name seems to be Statistics Indonesia, which leads to ``Statistics Indonesia of The Republic of Indonesia'' (for Biro Pusat Statistik Republik Indonesia). The loan word Biro in the official name has now been replaced by the native Badan.

Suriname, a Dutch colony that in 1975 achieved full legal independence (that doesn't mean it's independent of financial aid from the Netherlands), has an Algemeen Bureau voor de Statistiek (`General Bureau for Statistics').

The Netherlands Antilles, formerly known as the Dutch West Indies, has been part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands since 1954 (like Suriname from 1954 to 1975). This status seems to be more like that of Puerto Rico's as a commonwealth territory of the US, rather than like that of independent countries of the British Commonwealth. Aruba was originally part of the Netherlands Antilles, but was granted separate independent status, still within the Kingdom of the Netherlands, in 1986. Aruba has a Central Bureau of Statistics. (Stay tuned: it seems the Netherlands Antilles may be dissolved, with Curaçao and Bonaire becoming independent countries and the smaller islands becoming a province of the Netherlands, or something of that sort.)

In order to finish writing up all my physics labs at the end of my first semester in college, I pulled a double all-nighter (i.e., I stayed up over fifty straight hours; I'm not that young any more). During my last hour or two of consciousness, I hallucinated, or maybe just dreamt on my feet, and this was unaccompanied by cognitive aspects of psychosis, aside from worrying about grades. Does that count? So I'm not crazy? Does this mean I have to serve the prison sentence?

Bonnet first described the syndrome in 1760. (I mean the CBS -- not exactly what I experienced.) This was before the days when patient confidentiality came to be such an important part of medical ethics, and anyhow Bonnet gets a professional `bye' on account of not really being a physician, exactly, so we know the identity of the patient: it was Charles's grandfather.

Charles Bonnet was also the name of Audrey Hepburn's character's father, played by Hugh Griffith, in the delightful 1966 instructional film ``How to Steal a Million.'' (If they made a prequel today, it would be an infomercial.)

CBS is not a lot like the dream-like hallucinations that often accompany sleep deprivation, except that both tend to be ``pleasant'' or ``comforting.'' CBS occurs in the elderly and typically accompanies ocular pathology such as macular degeneration. In other words, it results from attempts of the brain to make sense of defective visual information. As I noted above, the coincidence with the broadcast media corporation is too rich. In CBS, people usually imagine they see things that are smaller than normal (little people, for example). Sort of like on TV.

CBS was founded in 1928, when William S. Paley bought United Independent Broadcasters, Inc. and renamed it the Columbia Broadcasting System. Early days, they would say ``this is the CBS'' as we still say the FBI. In 1974 the acronym was sealed and the company became CBS, Inc. This was purchased by the Westinghouse Electric Corp. in 1995, and Westinghouse renamed itself CBS Corporation in 1997. Bits and pieces of this were sold off in subsequent years, and what remained was purchased by Viacom in 1999 or 2000. Eventually, Viacom was split into Viacom and CBS Corporation, with the latter having the broadcast network as its core business.

CBS has the epithet of ``the Tiffany Network,'' reputed to be an allusion to the quality of its programming in the Paley era, or less plausibly because some of CBS's first demonstrations of color TV, in 1950, were in the former Tiffany & Co. building in NYC. Nowadays the epithet is typically used in lamentations of the declining quality and prestige of CBS News. The prestige was real, cemented by the legendary Edward R. Murrow with his dramatic reporting from England during the Blitz. It's been downhill since, and fairly precipitously in the 21st century. Regarding CBS programming generally, ``we look forward to'' an upcoming ``reality show'' called ``Kid Nation.''

The team nickname is ``Customs'' (also Douane -- see ASFC). It's not whether you win or lose -- it's how you play the game.

A careful examination of the map shows that Canada has land borders with the US and, uh, the US. This is not such a common situation. We set aside island nations (like Ireland, the UK, Brunei, East Timor, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Papua New Guinea), of course. A few countries are entirely surrounded by (and have a land border with) a single other country: Lesotho, the Vatican, and San Marino (Lesotho is enclosed by South Africa; we'll let you guess which two are in Italy). The countries which definitely have a land border with only one other country without being surrounded all have sea coasts (no such countries are squashed up against just a river or lake): Denmark, Monaco, Portugal, the Gambia, and South Korea. (Bangladesh touches Burma, and Swaziland has a Mozambican border.) Qatar occupies a peninsula that borders Saudi Arabia on the south. The western end of the UAE comes close and may or may not border Qatar. All I want to know is: how do they assign the ``mineral rights''?

Well, it seems that the CBSA isn't concerned only with land borders. Still, they should have called it the ``US Border Services Agency'' -- that would have caused amusing confusion and possibly even eliminated some errorist threats.

Interesting factoids about the evolving CBSA will be available from the website of the Canadian Prime Minister's office.

It can't be government censorship if it's not governmental! (But the CRTC maintains that ``[i]ncreased reliance on self-regulation, however, does not imply that the Commission [the CRTC] is relinquishing its responsibilities. Any interested party may, at any time, choose to approach the Commission directly.'')

Famous quote:

In Canada we respect freedom of speech but we do not worship it.

        bcc    Borland C
	btc    Borland Turbo C
	gcc    GNU C
	cc     Unix C
               (traditionally bundled with the Unix operating system)
	cl     Microsoft C
	ztc    Zortec C

Copies now are more often created by photocopying, by ink-impregnated paper, or by digital reproduction of an electronic original. Cc: labels a mail header field listing one or more addresses that an email should be sent to in addition to any addresses indicated in the To: field. Cf. Bcc.

The first house pet clone was a gray tabby cat named CC. This achievement was perpetrated at Texas A&M in February 2002, with help from the biotech firm Genetics Savings & Clone. That company plans to offer pet owners the chance, by 2003, to replace old pets with genetically almost identical copies.

The clones are not completely identical genetically, since they are made by transferring the donor chromosomes into a cell from which DNA has been removed. The DNA from mitochondria and other organelles in the original egg remain, and differ to some degree from that of corresponding organelles in the donor.

Moreover, identical genotype does not guarantee identical phenotype. For example, although donor (Fluffy, in this case) and clone (CC) have identical sets of the gene pairs that control fur color, the expression of these genes does not follow a simple dominant-recessive pattern. Fluffy has a calico coat; CC is, as noted, gray.

I'm not going to repeat here the Goethe quote I recently mentioned at the BSET entry.

More recently, a physicist I know, who went to a small Baptist school on a football scholarship, needed a job and went to a local preach' to declare: ``I wanna preach the BaAAAAAahble!'' -- got a job on the spot. He eventually tired of that, or maybe got too many ministers' daughters in trouble; I met him making equipment for HEP.

Another guy I know was getting a Ph.D. in Rocket Science at a Big-Time Ivy League school. He visited his fiancée's old neighborhood during a traditional old-country block party, and his future brothers-in-law took him aside for the traditional old-country serious talk about honorable intentions and ...

``... and whaddaya gonna do when you get outa school?''
``I plan to become a Professor of Rocket Science at [Prestigious East-Coast University].''
``What, you wanna be a teacher? Ain'tcha got no ambishun?''

[Names and details have been changed to improve the story.]

Could there be a pattern here?

(Although the choice of terminology is completely inexplicable by us, there is no mystery about the coincidence of English and French abbreviations. In both languages, these are C.C., O.C., and C.M. This occurred completely by accident.)

``The Order of Canada was established in 1967 [wasn't that an anniversary or somethin'?] to recognize outstanding achievement and service in various fields of human endeavour. Appointments are made on the recommendation of an Advisory Council, chaired by the Chief Justice of Canada. The motto of the Order is `Desiderantes meliorem patriam - They desire a better country'.''

I see a couple of problems with the Latin motto's translation. First is that desiderantes means, in this context, `they who desire.' This is mistranslated so uniformly that I'm having trouble trusting my eyes. So it's more of a description than a statement. Second, as translated it can be interpreted as meaning that members of the order wish that the US were a better neighbor. When patriam is translated a little more accurately, as `homeland' or `fatherland,' the meaning becomes easy for us Americans to understand: `they who wish they lived in the US' or `they who wish they'd been born in the US.' Bill Casselman sort of agrees with me. He argues slightly inconsistently that to the sensitive Latinist, the motto means that order members long to be dead again. I suggest that we just regard this as a two-part motto, with the Latin and vernacular parts expressing sentiments that reinforce each other. Something similar is done with the French part of the Latin-and-French motto: it's also formulated as a statement rather than as a noun phrase. (More philological analysis is described at the related OC entry. I hope to have some slightly funnier material at the CM entry.) Happily, the US got its Latin mottoing out of the way when educated people still had the elements of Latin. As this bit from Macauley's History of England indicates (search on mottoes), among English-speakers the devising of Latin mottoes has long been regarded as a specialized task best left to experts.

Casselman also hates the medal design and serves a good jpeg of it. I like the jaunty way the crown is cocked.

The Order of Canada is Canada's highest (or three highest) civilian honor(s). A ribbon bearing the words desiderantes meliorem patriam was also added to the Canadian coat of arms in 1967.

Two random variables are correlated if they are not independent. The independence of two random variables x, y can be expressed as the factorizability of their joint probability distribution function P(x, y) -- if the variables are independent, then there exist distributions (normalized, positive, measurable in the Lebesgue sense) P₁(x) and P₂(y) such that

I'm mobile!

Classicists can no longer huddle in the rear in the surf as waves of their greenhorn Greek and Latin 1 A-ers are machine-gunned in the sand. If we are going to lose Greek, let us do so with burly, cigar-chomping professors, red-eyed from overload classes, wounds oozing from bureaucratic combat, chests bristling with local teaching medals and complimentary Rotary pens from free lecturing, barking orders and dragging dozens of dead bodies forward as they brave administrative gunfire, oblivious to the incoming rounds from ethnic studies and contemporary cinema.

It is rosy-fingered dawn on the day of the epic battle. ``Here, son: have some spiritus asper. You'll need it before this day is done.'' Later...

Construe! Construe!
Hold the dochmiac line!

Damn the torpedoes and conjugate to the max! In the name of Zeus-- batten the scansions! ... They're recensing! They're recensing!! Hit 'em in the gutturals! Reload vowel quantities! Go gettus, go getta-- Go-ooo gettum!!!!

Oh, uh... waitasec. Ummm, tiny little corrigendiculum: Spanish clasista isn't `classicist,' it's like English classist, a different word related to clase, `class.' So CCC is just an Argentine organization whose name means something vaguely like `combative classist stream.' (Actually, it means that rather precisely, but it's vague in both languages.) People trying to make sense of it may come up with `class-struggler movement.'

Nevermind...

``The Certified Coin Exchange - CCE is an electronic exchange for US certified rare coin dealers. Founded in 1990, the CCE is open for trading among its 130+ member firms every business day. CCE provides dealers and collectors a ready market and pricing data as well as a way to execute rare coin transactions. CCE member firms have agreed to rules which govern delivery of coins and payment, as well as dispute resolution procedures. There are currently in excess of 37,000 bids for US certified rare coins posted on CCE and about 4,000 asks.''

Successor of ANE.

Hey Pops -- you want fries with that?

This entry is a good illustration of the great utility and convenience of having names in two languages. Without the French, you might make the mistake of supposing that this was a Canadian foundation about communications. With the French, you realize that it's a foundation about Canadian communications. The English is useful too, because if you don't know French, you probably think this is a Canadian journal for foundry studies. (You probably realized all this before, but I have to mention it because most other readers are not as sharp as you are. Please send money now so we can continue our valuable outreach efforts to enlighten the benighted.)

``The CCHREI's goal is to ensure the right match between the skills and knowledge of Canadians with environmental employment, and the needs of the environment sectors. This match will enable Canadian industry to maintain a world class environmental workforce. The CCHREI is working toward its goal by: developing national occupational standards, certifying individuals with environmental employment and accrediting environmental courses and programs, helping young Canadians enter the environmental labour market, promoting cooperation between industry, government, and the academic community, and, conducting research on the environmental labour market.''

[Labour is a special Canadianese word meaning `labor.']

La Version français: Conseil canadien des ressources humaines de l'industrie de l'environnement (CCRHIE).

This is not illustrated at right.

Originally a standards body of IEEE; has been succeeded by the ITU-TSS or ITU-T.

``[R]esponsible for one of Europe's largest multidisciplinary research support organisations, the [not at all] Central Laboratory of the Research Councils (CLRC).''

A member of the recently inaugurated SBF Hall of Acronym Fame (SHAB).

That's 256, for those of you keeping score at home. According to their low-visuals website, CCLVI has four local affiliates:

1. NCCLV (National Capital Citizens with Low Vision, Washington, D.C.)
355. CCCLV (California Council of Citizens with Low Vision)
750. (malformed) DVCCLV (Delaware Valley Council of Citizens with Low Vision)
1156. MCLVI (Metropolitan Council of Low Vision Individuals, New York)

The three-story downtown building, at Second Street NW between D and E Streets, is now a 1400-bed shelter (1250 men, 150 women), still run by the CCNV. The shelter itself is also frequently referred to as the CCNV, though it's a bit more accurate to call it the CCNV shelter.

Despondent over his failed relationship with fellow homeless activist Carol Fennelly, Mitch Snyder committed suicide in July 1990. Fennelly led CCNV until January 1994, when she was ousted by the CCNV board. Gregory Keith Mitchell, a former computer programmer and drug dealer who was rescued by the shelter and made good, was voted the new director (technically: ``Vice-President''). His wife was named Secretary-Treasurer. In 1996 he was ousted (that seems to be the only way to leave alive) amid various charges of misuse of funds; in 1998 he pled guilty to stealing $65,000 out of HUD grants.

In case it hadn't occurred to you already, you should check the pea entry for more about homelessness.

In testy testimony before Congress in 1980, Mitch Snyder claimed that there were 2.2 million homeless in the US. Later he claimed that the number was three million, and numbers in the low millions have been popular scare stats among homeless activists ever since. The calculation that this number was based on was apparently political, and Snyder was adept at that kind of mathematics. The number has also been justified on the basis of telephone surveys to bien pensant fellow shelter operators, but maybe that's the same thing. Grindingly sound surveys and censuses, which arrive at boring, mere statistical accuracy, find numbers clustering around 300,000, and with very high likelihood within the range 200,000 to 600,000. (Peter Rossi of the University of Massachusetts estimated 330,000; the US census came up with 230,000 for a typical single day in 1990. Given the unavoidable uncertainties in counting, it would be hard to plot a reliable trend since the late 1980's, which were the glory days for this kind of study.) A third of a million homeless is a tragedy, but it is a different tragedy than two million homeless, particularly when it means that most of the homeless are deinstitutionalized mentally ill.

I have to track down Mitch Snyder's ipsissima verba. I recall they included a statement of his indomitable credo of defiance against the evil concept of accurate counting.

See, for example, Allan Rosman and Michael Nofal: ``Computer controlled pump unit cuts power, increases output,'' World Oil, vol. 217, pp. 53ff (November 1996).

CHRCL at least has a website.

How long will it be before the members of CCR find themselves rocking the chairs in a CCRC?

The CCR's are a contract agreed by every purchaser of property that is part of a planned community. If a planned community and a community association are the privately realized analogues of a municipality and its government, then the CCR's are analogous to municipal laws (but they tend to be difficult to amend). For more, see this introduction to community associations from the perspective of a student of parliamentary process.

``Unit'' seems to be one of those name units that later begins to seem like not such a good idea after all. Another example is Moon Unit Zappa, the daughter of Frank Zappa. Discussing the death-ray-on-the-moon project in ``Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me'' (1999), Dr. Evil says

The moon unit will be divided into two divisions: Moon Unit Alpha and Moon Unit Zappa.

Moon was born on September 28, 1967. So was Mira Sorvino. (Coincidentally, this entry was first put in the glossary on September 28, 2003.) The first soft (i.e. survivable) landings on the moon of vehicles from earth took place in 1966 -- the Soviet Luna 9 on February 3, the US Surveyor 1 on June 2, and Luna 13, which was launched on December 21 and landed on the 24th. (I'm not sure to what points on earth these dates are referenced.)

Incidentally, the Alpha-Zappa thing reminds me of something that happened to a journal called The Historian. This is published for Phi Alpha Theta, a history honor society with chapters at over 700 (mostly US) universities. Following the usual practice of Greek-letter societies, each chapter is designated by one, two, or three Greek letters (the first 24 chapters founded had one-letter names, the next 576 chapters had two-letter names, and the most recent chapters have three-letter names). Each issue of The Historian lists the newest initiates into the society by chapter. Originally, the chapters were arranged according to the order of letters in the Greek alphabet. (You probably remember ``I am the alpha and the omega.'' Omega is the final letter of the Greek alphabet.) Beginning with the Fall 1997 issue, the chapters have been alphabetized according to the English spellings of the Greek letters' names (... tau, theta, upsilon, ...). I am tempted to write that this is stupid, but a more precise characterization would be ``capitulation to ignorance.''

If you're still reading, then the logical order for reading entries would have you going on to the collating sequence entry. If you're not still reading, then you can ignore this.

On October 16, 2008, at Ravenna Bowl in the town of Ravenna in western Michigan, Don Doane bowled his first perfect game. He was 62, and he had been bowling with the same five-man team for 45 years (Nutt Farms, one of the 16 teams that compete in the Commercial League there). Normally this sort of thing doesn't make news, but as he was hugging and high-fiving his teammates, Doane collapsed of a heart attack. EMT's were unable to revive him; he was taken to a hospital but died. So it made Sports Illustrated and newspapers in Thailand and Australia, and you probably heard and read about it.

This story confirms what we all know: too much excitement can kill you. My advice is to tone it down, and if things are getting too exciting, take a break. By all means have fun, but not too much fun. Are you happy now? Maybe that's not a good thing. Your heart isn't racing, is it? Oh no! Here quick, think about these horrible lyrics:

Hey girls, gather round
Listen to what I'm putting down.

How do you feel now, worse? Good! Remember that it's important to calibrate this thing. You want to dose yourself carefully. So if you're feeling bad enough, stop now. Otherwise, read on:

Here is the main thing that I want to say
I'm busy twenty-four hours a day
I fix broken hearts, I know that I truly can.

If you need a refill, just do a search on the song title "Handy Man" and the singer "James Taylor." It's the Barry Manilowest thing he ever did. Cf. the latter's ``I Write the Songs'' (``...of love and spe-ecial thi-ings'').

I want to warn you that at this point, we're going to deviate from the heretofore narrow focus of this entry on cardiac care and consider shopping district management and demographics. Be it noted, however, that many shopping malls now have AED's.

Christchurch, the second-largest city in New Zealand, has a central shopping district with over 400 businesses. According to Paul Lonsdale, the manager of the Central City Business Association there, they have a problem with several dozen young people who regularly spread rubbish, spray graffiti, get drunk, use drugs, swear, and intimidate patrons. The obvious solution would be to require them to purchase the rubbish they spread (and the spray paint and intimidation supplies, etc.) only from local merchants. But the business association, with the approval of the city council and the police, has thought of something more subtle.

They plan to pipe music into the mall area. ``Nice, easy listening'' music like Manilow's ``Can't Smile Without You,'' ``Mandy,'' and other pop hits. ``The intention is to change the environment in a positive way ... so nobody feels threatened or intimidated'' according to Lonsdale. They hope that BM's ``smooth and gentle tones'' either pacify the unruly teens or else drive them away. The Press newspaper interviewed one 16-year-old who promised defiance if the threatened measure is implemented. ``We would just bring a stereo and play it louder,'' said Emma Belcher, who I am grateful chose not to remain anonymous. According to the AP story on March 3, 2009, that is my main source for these paragraphs, Lonsdale retorted that the city would then hit them with anti-noise laws. If noise is unwelcome sound, then she might bring countercharges. Perhaps Lonsdale was laying the groundwork for a defense when he insisted that ``I did not say Barry Manilow is a weapon of mass destruction.'' It's obviously more selective than that.

You know, it is my ambition that one day all the entries in this glossary will form a single hyperlinked ``cluster,'' in the percolation-model or graph-theoretic or seven-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon sense. Entries like this are important in achieving this ambition, because it is necessary to establish and demonstrate the firm connection between WMD-related content and pop-music-related content, not to mention the medical aspects. You may want to have a look at our spiffy new torture music entry, although it still needs stuff about the US siege of the Papal Nuncio's compound in Panama when Noriega took asylum there. Now all I need is another Latin link.

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

There are a variety of formats defined for various kinds of data and application. The standard music CD uses the Redbook audio format (so called because the spec was distributed in a red book). This has a bit depth of 16 and a sampling rate of 44.1 kHz.

Maine has an interesting way of allocating its votes in the Electoral College. The popular majority statewide is used to select two electors, and popular majority in each CD determines ``its'' EC elector. The way things looked for a long time, it seemed this might matter in 2004. Nebraska uses the same system, but all districts were expected to go to a single ticket (Republican). In fact, through 2004 neither state has split its electoral vote since they changed their allocation laws (1969 in Maine and 1991 in Nebraska).

In the 2004 general election, there was a ballot issue in Colorado to amend the state constitution. The proposed amendment 36 would have apportioned electoral votes in proportion to the popular vote (without respect to CD's, but this seemed a good place to mention it anyway). If passed, it was supposed to take effect immediately, determining EV apportionment for the 2004 presidential election. Most polls favored the Republican ticket to win a narrow victory in the state in 2004, so Democrats stood to benefit from a switch of as many as four of the state's nine EV's in that cycle. (In the very close election that was anticipated, that might have been decisive.) The effective-immediately provision, however, was challenged in court in mid-October, and fear of adding to election confusion and uncertainty worked against approval of the amendment. Both major parties opposed the amendment, with one of the main stated objections being that it would make Colorado a guaranteed fly-over in future presidential campaigns. The ballot proposition had some popular traction, but was eventually solidly defeated.

The US House of Representatives is the lower house of a bicameral legislature, and many democracies have bicameral legislatures with identifiable upper and lower houses. In parliamentary democracies without a separately elected executive, however, the different role of parties, the typically attenuated role of the upper house, and the different dynamics of power make the correspondence with the US system a bit shaky. With that proviso, at least at the formal level one may say that in Canada, what correspond to US CD's are the voting districts for the House of Commons. These are informally known as ``ridings.'' It puts me in the mind of Dudley Do-right, the only cartoon character I can think of with a hyphenated name.

CDAI = 2F +  5F +  7F +  20F +  30F +  10F +  6F +  F   ,
         1     2     3      4      5      6     7    8

The real Cyrano de Bergerac was a seventeenth-century writer. In one of his stories, he proposed seven ways to reach the Moon from Earth, including rockets. The other six ways wouldn't have worked. In True History, written in around 150 C.E., Lucian of Samosata explains how a Greek ship could reach the Moon by winds and water-spouts. When you consider that a water-spout is a jet and that the propellant in modern rockets is electrolyzed water (i.e., combusted hydrogen and oxygen), this is amazingly prescient. In the movie Roxanne, the title character (Roxanne Kowalski, played by Daryl Hannah) is an astronomer. More on Roxanne and other Steve Martin movies at the Hfuhruhurr entry.

It provides speeds up to 100 Mbps, for distances up to approximately 200 km, but only 125 mi., yet again demonstrating the inferiority of the metric system.

The copper cables are shielded twisted pairs, thus the alternative name SDDI.

Well, they had to give up physical torture and immolation in the eighteenth century. But they still get to work in secret, ignore their own rules, conduct kangaroo proceedings, lie, punish their enemies, excommunicate, etc. So it's fun work if you can get it. I hear the church is short of normal heterosexual men who would like to take vows of celibacy and obedience, but I haven't yet seen help-wanted ads for CDF in particular. Until then you might get some pointers from The Modern Inquisition : Seven prominent Catholics and their struggles with the Vatican, by Paul Collins (Woodstock and New York: Overlook Pr., 2002).

G. Vignale and Mark Rasolt, Phys. Rev. Lett. 59, 2360 (1987). and Phys. Rev. B 37, 10685 (1988).

The method is obsolete a few times over.

Different entries for a given head text, usually corresponding to different expansions of a shared initialism, are normally ordered in this glossary by alphabetizing on the definition text. I figured this is a good place to point that out, since this entry is almost problematical. Alphabetization here is based on the immediate appearance of text rather than on its expansion. (The reasoning is that if you knew all that, you wouldn't be looking it up. The flaw in the reasoning is that since you don't know all that, the ordering isn't especially helpful.)

Here's some standard Census Bureau boilerplate, taken from the same appendix as the MCD boilerplate; I've only added a hyphen and an otiose parenthetical aside:

Census-designated places (CDPs) are delineated for each decennial census as the statistical counterparts of incorporated places. CDPs are delineated to provide census data for concentrations of population, housing, and commercial structures that are identifiable by name but are not within an incorporated place. CDP boundaries usually are defined in cooperation with state, local, and tribal officials. [What -- no community activists??? Stonewalling!] These boundaries, which usually coincide with visible features or the boundary of an adjacent incorporated place or other legal entity boundary, have no legal status, nor do these places have officials elected to serve traditional municipal functions. CDP boundaries may change from one decennial census to the next with changes in settlement pattern; a CDP with the same name as in an earlier census does not necessarily have the same boundary.

• comp.publish.cdrom.hardware
• comp.publish.cdrom.software
• comp.publish.cdrom.multimedia

Here's a colorful picture from the Smithsonian's Information Age photo exhibit.

A local-focus posting on the Classics list points to a few other postings on CD-ROM readers.

A CD-ROM holds up to 680 Megabytes of data, about the same as 300,000 pages of text.

Places to look for particular CD-ROM's:

• The CD.ROM Store. (As opposed to The CD-ROM STORE, which sells CD-ROM readers and recorders.)
• Multimedia 200. No search engine, but so few titles you won't miss it.

Lattice constant of 4.136 Å is by far the smallest among common compound semiconductors, so it doesn't lattice match or even make a tolerable pseudomorphic heterointerface with anything, so it isn't used to make any heterostructures. Room-temperature direct bandgap of 2.42 eV isn't very exciting either.

Lattice constant of 6.050 Å is in a populous neighborhood.

Bandgap of CdTe is 1.58 eV; lattice constant is 6.482 Å.

According to a 1996.11.20 posting by Fei Long in the semiconductors-2-6 newsgroup, he (at the University of Hull) and Paul Harrison (at the University of Leeds) had recently published work on the CdTe band structure. Here's the meat of the posting.

This is probably a good place to mention the problem of Man's alienation from God, and how it's much worse than not being able to attend classes located conveniently near your home. And how the rapture will take place at warp speed. (But maybe I have the wrong religion. Do they teach Kierkegaard?) However, I don't know enough about all that and the information doesn't seem to be within reaching distance, so I'll just quote CDU's homepage, which says it was ``established in 1983 to respond to the need for life long spiritual formation and a deeper knowledge of Church Teaching. CDU's mission calls for transmitting faithfully and systematically the teachings of Sacred Scripture, the living Tradition of the Church and the authentic Magisterium, as well as the spiritual heritage of the Fathers, Doctors and Saints.''

The Courses-and-Programs page has a cool picture of the old pope hunched over a laptop. (I mean ``old pope'' here not as opposed to ``new pope'' but as opposed to ``younger pope.'' In other words, the same old pope when he was new.) This picture reminds me of those tired old gag pictures of people holding up monuments. You know: someone stands in the foreground with arms raised and palms flattened under an imaginary weight, and in the background a mass of concrete or whatever, lined up by the photographer's angle to appear to be pressing down on those thumbs. I mean, the pope is always hunched over squinting at the floor a few feet away. Put an open laptop before him and it's a wrap! (The laptop is black. Unless you're going as a Cardinal or as one of those fruit-colored Swiss guards, black is the only fashionable color for Vatican City.)

Another thing that picture reminds me of is an early Saturday Night Live sketch in which President Ronald Reagan does a rap video. Whenever the old man has to move, a couple of Secret Service men pick him up by the shoulders like a talking prop. It had a catchy tune, too.

The ``Ronald Reagan'' in the preceding paragraph, by the way, was not the actual president. Ralph Nader and Al Gore have appeared on the program, and probably some others who were presidential candidates, but the closest they got to having Ronald Reagan on the show was when they got his son Michael Reagan on. Michael (a dancer at the time) did a skit in which he jumped around in his skivvies, and it was reported that his parents wondered why. (It was a parody of a scene in a popular movie of the time -- Tom Cruise in ``Risky Business''? I can't find it on the web, so I guess this didn't happen either.)

Along about this point, when I first wrote this entry, I thought it would be apposite to put in a link to wherever it was in the glossary that I told a related story about Benoit Mandelbrot, but I couldn't find it. Coming back now, I see that the story is in the glossary, so I can provide a link to it.

Benoit Mandelbrot is the fellow who gave the name fractal to geometric objects of noninteger dimension, and he promoted fractals so effectively that scientists actually recognized their value and fractals achieved a pop-culture vogue. Mandelbrot was a sort of scholar-in-residence at IBM's main research labs (I guess that would be in White Plains, NY), at least in the late seventies and eighties, and he was naturally part of a video that IBM made then to spread the gospel of fractal beauty. In the video, Mandelbrot does a little introduction, then turns to a desktop computer and watches as a fractal begins to fill the screen. The audience may be forgiven for assuming that Mandelbrot has pressed a key to launch the application. However, the story goes that Mandelbrot, who worked at IBM as a mathematician (other people did his programming), was so computer-phobic or -averse that he refused to so much as lower a finger onto the keyboard. The way the problem was eventually handled was that somebody crouched behind the chair while Mandelbrot talked, then with one finger on the keyboard launched the necessary application, all below the camera's view. I heard this at a seminar at Princeton Plasma Labs at Forrestal in about 1983, but I can't find this story on the web either.

Under the leadership of CDU Chancellor Helmut Kohl, Germany was reunited after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In 1998, after 16 years of rule, with continuing high unemployment and relatively slow economic growth, and in a continuing secret-campaign-funding scandal involving Mr. Kohl, the CDU suffered its worst electoral defeat since 1949. In the September 27 general elections, CDU/CSU won 35.2% of the vote, down from 41.4% in the 1994 elections, and ended up with 245 out of 669 Bundestag seats.

A red-green coalition (socialists and environmentalists) came to power, and Gerhard Schroeder, the new prime minister, promised to fix the economy. In a Nixon-goes-to-China sort of way (that is, with his solid leftist credentials to protect him), it was expected that he would be able to negotiate with the trade unions to reduce the job and unemployment benefits that make German labor expensive and German manufacture less competitive than it is regarded as needing to be. (Interestingly, however, one thing that Germany did not have as late as 2005 was a national minimum wage. One might reason that this is in the interests of the powerful industrial unions, which negotiate industry-wide minimum hourly wage agreements. Apart from this, however, the Sozialhilfe, which is more extensive than the social welfare available in the US, supplements the income of low-wage earners. Other EU nations without a statutory minimum-wage law are Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, and Cyprus.)

Schroeder had no significant success solving Germany's economic problems, and by the Summer of 2002 he and his party were behind in the polls. By making opposition to the US-led invasion of Iraq the main issue in the campaign, he was able to distract attention from the slow-growth economy and win.

In 2005, he again tried making an issue of US foreign policy, by insisting that Germany would not send troops to Iraq. It worked almost to the point of victory. He made up a substantial deficit in the polls, and the SPD forced the CDU into a tightly negotiated and greatly hamstrung red-black coalition.

Proof here that people smart enough to describe condensed matter physics research are not too smart to write ``CDW wave'' (an acronym AAP). Cf. next entry.

Click here to see some instances of the ever-popular ``CDW waiver,'' an AAP pleonasm. (Of course, this may only apply to the principle driver. Click here for that. The two usages seem to occur with comparable frequency, although the second is occasionally correct.) Cf. preceding entry.

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.

(In Spanish, the use of the singular ``la mujer'' to stand for women in general is a standard usage.) There's also a Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (Comité para la Eliminación de la Discriminación contra la Mujer; Comité pour l'élimination de la discrimination à l'égard des femmes). It is not abbreviated, as CEDAW or anything else, so far as I'm aware. This committee is ``a body [uh-huh] of 23 [what is this -- Sufi mysticism?] independent experts'' (oh sure) that ``receive[s] and consider[s] communications (petitions) from, or on behalf of, individuals or a group of individuals who claim to be victims of violations of the rights protected by the Convention.'' Rent by the hour; special rates for holidays and weekends.

The year 1899 was an interesting year in American college admissions. In June, Helen Keller passed the entrance examination of Radcliffe College, Harvard University. An ``Answers to Correspondents'' column in the August 19 New York Times reported that

Helen Keller, sometimes spelled Kellar, was born in Tuscambia, Ala., July 27, 1880. Her father was Arthur H. Keller, a Confederate officer, an editor, and at one time United States Marshal of Alabama. At the age of eighteen months, Helen, a bright and active child, was overcome by a disease which deprived her of sight, hearing, and the use of the organs of speech. At the age of seven years her parents began to educate her. In 1887 she was taken to Boston, where she became the pupil of Miss Sullivan, who remains with her to-day. Miss Sullivan was three years teaching the child lip reading. She will enter Radcliffe College, Harvard's Annex, in September. The girl is a relative of Robert E. Lee, and a great-great-granddaughter of Alexander Spottswood, the first Colonial Governor of Virginia. She is remarkably pretty, and has a lovable, poetic nature.

But the year's truly consequential event in college entrance exam history took place on December 1 in Trenton, New Jersey, at the 13th annual convention of the Association of Colleges and Preparatory Schools of the Middle States and Maryland. There before over 500 delegates, Prof. Nicholas Murray Butler (Dean of the School of Philosophy at Columbia University) read a paper urging the creation of a unified system for testing candidates for college admission. In a discussion following the paper, President Eliot of Harvard and President Low of Columbia pronounced themselves enthusiastically in favor of the proposal. President Patton of Princeton expressed reservations.

At the time, each college had its own set of requirements, with examinations in different sets of subjects, and different topics in the subjects they had in common. Each college offered examinations in various cities in areas of the country from which it expected to accept students. The chief selling point of Butler's proposal, however, was not the relief it would give the colleges from the burden of designing and administering all those exams. Rather, the advantage stressed was that standardization of entrance requirements would make it possible for secondary schools to know what to teach their students. (The discussion implicitly assumed that in the past, students had studied for only one exam.)

Under Butler's proposal, it was contemplated that tests would be created for each subject then currently part of the entrance examinations of two or more colleges, and that colleges could base their admissions on the students' performance on the subjects they chose to use as their basis for admission. (This information would be provided in certificates to be issued by the board administering the tests.)

The delegates at the Trenton meeting endorsed the plan. The proposed board was duly founded in 1900 as the College Entrance Examination Board of the Middle States and Maryland. Here is the list of chief examiners of the first Board of Examiners (along with the institutions where they were professors), announced on December 15, 1900, after their election by the College Board:

• Chemistry: Ira Remsen (JHU)
• English: Francis H. Stoddard (NYU)
• French: A. Guyot Cameron (Princeton Univ.)
• German: M.D. Learned (Univ. of Pennsylvania)
• Greek: Herbert Weir Smyth (Bryn Mawr College)
• History: Lucy M. Salmon (Vassar College)
• Latin: Charles E. Bennett (Cornell Univ.)
• Mathematics: Henry Dallas Thompson (Princeton Univ.)
• Physics: Edward L. Nichols (Cornell Univ.)

The following January 22, Prof. Butler of Columbia, in his capacity as Secretary of the College Board, released a list that included associate examiners. Each group of examiners consisted of one chief and two associate examiners. In each case, one associate was from a different college than the chief examiner, and the other associate was a secondary school teacher. (For Latin and mathematics groups they were high school principals.)

All of the schools represented on the Board of Examiners were in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, or (in the sole case of JHU) Maryland. I assume therefore that ``Middle States'' stood for the three northern Mid-Atlantic states.

In the January 22 announcement, Butler claimed that all colleges in the middle states and Maryland, as well as most colleges in the nation, would accept the College Board's certificates in lieu of their own exams.

Moving on up the alphabet, we notice that the Dutch sat out that war. It is commonly suggested that the German occupation of the Netherlands in WWII, which was mild compared to that of countries to the east, was resented more keenly by the Dutch because they hadn't suffered occupation in the previous war. Perhaps. As the war was ending and the Germans withdrew, there was famine in the cities; many people went into the countryside and dug up flower bulbs for food.

Not technically a part of the Canadian Forces were those of Newfoundland, mentioned at the Memorial entry.

Raymond Chandler, creator of Philip Marlowe and author of The Big Sleep and other works, was born in the US on July 23, 1888. After his parents' divorce, he moved to London with his mother in 1895 and was educated in England. He returned to the US in 1912, and in 1914 enlisted in the Canadian Army. (He joined the Canadian Army because they paid a dependent's allowance that he could send to his mother.) He served in the First Division of the CEF in France and became a platoon commander. In 1918 he was attached to the Royal Flying Corps (later the R.A.F.), but had not completed flight training when the Armistice came. He was demobilized in England; his mother returned with him to California.

The legendary cartoonist Chuck Jones (b. Sept. 21, 1912; d. Feb. 22, 2002) got his first regular job in 1932, washing cels. According to his grandson Craig Kausen, ``he thought he was going to be cleaning in a prison.''

If he had had a fast (superluminal) internet connection, he could have avoided confusion, unless it came from the Acme technology company.

Chuck Jones directed the first Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner cartoon (``Fast and Furry-ous,'' 1949) and had a hand in creating Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck.

If you didn't reach this entry by accident (it could happen), then you might be interested in this newsletter editors' resource guide.

The cell header holds addressee and flow-control information, in the form of values for six fields:

GFC

Generic Flow Control. A four-bit field for supporting multiplexing functions. The default value of zero means GFC protocol is ignored.

VPI

Virtual Path Identifier. An eight-bit field to identify the VP (duh).

VPI

Virtual Path Identifier. An eight-bit field to identify the VP (duh).

PT

CLP

HEC

Have you heard about this philosophy conference in Budapest, April 28-30, 2005? ``Seeing, Understanding, Learning in the Mobile Age.'' Contributions ``invited from philosophers, psychologists, education theorists, and other interested scholars [could this include electrical engineers? nah!] on the following and related topics:

• epistemology of the mobile phone
• from seeing to understanding
• visual communication and pictorial meaning
• from static pictures to dynamic images
• writing, speaking, messaging
• collective thinking and the network individual
• mobile communication and scientific change
• technology, media and the dissemination of knowledge
• ubiquitous learning and the transformation of education''

You learn something new every day. I didn't realize that anyone considered ``education theorists'' to be scholars, interested or otherwise.

Okay, enough about that poor, long-suffering supermodel. Here's a strange incident took place just before midnight, on April 23, 2005, along the possibly quite aptly named Savage-Guilford Road in Howard County, Md. Occupants of a vehicle shouted to a male pedestrian, who at first thought they were acquaintances. He approached the vehicle, and a male passenger appeared to point a weapon at him. Another passenger got out and ordered the pedestrian to empty his pockets. The other two occupants of the vehicle then got out. One grabbed the pedestrian around the throat, and the assailants rifled the pedestrian's pockets and took a cell phone. The assailants then drove away with the cell phone, made a U-turn and drove back. One of them threw the cell phone at the pedestrian and the robbers fled.

December 15, 2005, Council Bluffs, Iowa. A 48-year-old man rammed his pickup into the wooden deck in front of Chit Chat Wireless store at 2034 W. Broadway. The man, a Chit Chat subscriber who was clearly not well-gruntled by his cell-phone service, then got out of the truck and approached the front door of Chit Chat Wireless, evidently to have a chit chat. An employee inside the store judged that the man was ``up to no good,'' as he later told police, so he locked the door. The tough customer told the employee to open the door, but the employee accountably refused. (Well, unaccountably is a word....) The man then became upset (that's how the police report put it) and began punching and kicking at the glass door. He succeeded in shattering the glass, but didn't get in. (This would be the right time to cue the ``I hear you knockin' / But you can't come in'' ringtone.) He then threw his cell phone at the door and drove off. The customer was later arrested at a hospital where he sought treatment for the hand he hurt breaking the door.

To be frank, they should have saved this acronym for teachers of Gaelic. (The Franks were speakers of a West Germanic language in the area of present-day northern France. Their language was influential in the development of the French language, and the name France is derived from the tribe's name.)

Got it! It's:

To be frank, I think ``Communist Economic Mummble and Ahhh'' is more informmative.

The title of that Steven King novel and Mary Lambert-directed horror movie is ``Pet Sematary.'' That's overkill.

I suppose the reason for my error is that in my native Spanish, the word is cementerio. After I became aware of the difference, I noticed that my mom makes the same error in English. But the error may not be so rare -- I heard it in a radio ad in 2005. Another word whose spelling in Spanish can easily mislead one in English is substraer (`to subtract'). That is, I used to, uh, em, never mind.

The Spanish cognate is cementerio. Yes, that's with an en. Perhaps the en got in there via an assumed connection with entierro (`burial') and enterrar (`to inter'). I feel compelled to mention that the Spanish words for exhume, exhumation are constructed as something like ``unbury, unburial'' (desenterrar, desentierro).

Useful list of terms that sound utterly different in Spanish:
entrar -- to enter
enterrar -- to inter
enterar -- to let know
[enterarse -- to find out]
Also note:
entero -- entire, whole

A few miles east of Point Concepcion (probably Punto Concepción at some point in its history -- particularly the point of its first conception), there's a ``Canada Cementeria'' according to the map. That is, a Cañada Cementería. This is either the cement-mixing ravine or the burial gully. If it were in New Jersey instead of California, that wouldn't be ambiguous. (If you find the last comment confusing, see the teamster entry. If you haven't had enough of obfuscated interlingual puns, visit the faux ami entry. For another example of an unexpected en, see the gringo entry.) For an instance involving a similar pair of sounds in a pair of words having similar meanings, see the mujerengo and mujeriego entries.

What, still here? Don't you follow links? Try this one, for an epitaph.

Centaurus is the Latin name for what we call a `centaur'!

CEN's mission is to promote voluntary technical harmonization in Europe in conjunction with worldwide bodies and its partners in Europe.

Harmonization diminishes trade barriers, promotes safety, allows interoperability of products, systems and services, and promotes common technical understanding.

In Europe, CEN works in partnership with CENELEC -- the European Committee for Electrotechnical Standardization (www.cenelec.be) and ETSI -- the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (www.etsi.fr).

Vide etiam SBA and NASE and AHBA.

Hain't we got all the fools in town on our side? and ain't that a big enough majority in any town?

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, ch. 26.

In music, a cent is one one-hundredth of a half tone. Since music intervals are not absolute frequency differences but frequency ratios, this means more precisely that two notes differing by one cent have pitches (frequencies) in the ratio of 2^1/1200 (yes, the 1200th root of two). For example, in the usual tuning, the fifth string of a six-string guitar is an A with a frequency of 110 Hz. If you're sitting in my bedroom with the air conditioning roaring and you're tryin' to tune that string with one o'them newfangled eelectronic tuners, the 120 Hz component of the A/C vibration is going to spoof the tuner, to the tune of one or two half-steps (or half-tones -- we can do it both ways). Now you want to know,

1200 log₂(120/110) =  150.6 or so. (That is, about a quarter tone above A^#.) Cf. decibels.

Noisy fluorescent lights hum at 120 Hz also, but with a tinnier timbre.

This situation may be contrasted with that of the corresponding legislative authority of the federal government of the US: According to Art. I, Sec. 6 of the US constitution,

No Senator or Representative shall, during the Time for which he was elected, be appointed to any civil Office under the Authority of the United States, which shall have been created, or the Emoluments whereof shall have been encreased during such time; and no Person holding any Office under the United States, shall be a Member of either House during his Continuance in Office.

Similarly, Art. II, Sec. 1 forbids members of the Electoral College to hold other federal office:

... no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector.

On the executive side, the restriction on multiple offices takes a weaker form:

The President shall, at stated Times, receive for his Services, a Compensation, which shall neither be increased nor diminished during the Period for which he shall have been elected, and he shall not receive within that Period any other Emolument from the United States, or any of them.

European corporations are generally less likely to have the same person serve as CEO and Chairman. Also, many publicly held corporations in Europe -- particularly in Germany (.de) it seems -- have worker (viz. union) representation on the board.

The Chairman of the Board is not very often abbreviated as COB.

The late Frank Sinatra was also referred to as ``Ol' Blue Eyes'' and ``the Chairman of the Board.'' Another New Jersey (NJ) music icon, Bruce Springsteen, is known as ``the Boss.'' In 1984, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band had a hit with an album (and its title track) ``Born in the U.S.A.''

Yet another pop music icon with a rank appellation was Nat ``King'' Cole. He was born in the USA, but not in New Jersey. He was born in Montgomery, Alabama, on March 17, 1917.

During the Cold War, the USSR usually (from the late sixties or so) held an advantage in strategic missile throw weight. (The US usually led in SLBM's and bombers.) An important part of the argument in parity computations was the fact that more accurate missiles can kill a target using less megatonnage.

The library has been trying to unload some back issues of Revista de la CEPAL on its dollar table, and I'm going to give them some free advertising. The journal seems to be a thrice-yearly (April, August, December) publication of the United Nations, ISSN 0251-0257, edited and printed in Santiago, Chile. For a dollar, that should be enough.

CEPTES has a regularly scheduled volleyball game with CAPTES (Center Against Philosophy of Technology or Engineering Science) on the fourth Thursday after the second Monday of each month.

... Now the copula `is' which Radcliffe-Brown himself uses here--`he is a biological organism': `he is a citizen of England'--is highly significant. He does not say: a man has a body or he plays a role. This form of words is avoided because it implies a third element, namely the true self, which neither is a body but has a body, nor is a role-complex but plays roles. Am I really no more than body on the one hand, actor on the social stage on the other? Am I not a substantive ego in the Cartesian sense....

Religion: a smile on a dog.

Yeah, yeah, I gotta add some stuff on President William Jefferson (``Bill'') Clinton, a former Rhodes scholar, who expounded on the copulative verb to a grand jury:

It depends upon what the meaning of the word ``is'' is.

In 2006 it was reclassified as a dwarf planet. For the time being, at least, it's clearly not a plutoid, because plutoids are trans-Neptunian by (current) definition, or at least sometimes trans-Neptunian. I've also read equivocal claims about whether Ceres ceased or did not cease to be an asteroid. I hereby issue a Stammtisch Beau Fleuve Directive recognizing Ceres as an asteroid. I can't be bothered to sort out the other stuff, because the boy who cried ``dwarf planet!'' (that's the IAU, for short) will scramble its definitions soon again anyway.

Okay! Alright already! In response to countless requests (that's right, I haven't counted them, or it, or whatever the pronoun[s] for nonpositive numbers is or are or whatever) to lift the confusion created by the IAU, I am issuing a new SBF Directive on dwarf planets. A dwarf planet is a planet whose humanoid inhabitants are mostly dwarves or seem to walk awkwardly but aren't obese. If the planet has no humanoids, it may qualify on the basis of bonsai trees.

You know, that long parenthetical in the last paragraph reminds me of the great French grammarian Dominique Bouhours, S.J.; when he died in 1702, his last words are reputed to have been:

Je vais ou je vas mourir, l'un et l'autre se dit ou se disent.

• CIAC (glossary entry)
• FIRST (glossary entry)
• CERT/CC (Coordination Center) (glossary entry)
• AusCERT (Australia) (glossary entry)
• DFN-CERT (Germany) (glossary entry)
• CERT-UU (Utrecht University, Holland) (glossary entry)
• JPCERT/CC (Japanese Coordination Center) (glossary entry)

• Up-To-Date
• Easy To Use
• All Tests -- No Filler.

7 Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh EH8 9LW.

Well, relax; CEST is gone now. They did their deeds into the early 1990's, apparently, but by 2008 their homepage was a domainer's generic search form with no sign of a successor organization. All that's left is some technical reports and glossary entries.

It was based in London, so it was probably a ``Centre'' rather than a ``Center,'' but the text at vestigial dead links are equivocal on the question. For your convenience, however, and also to keep the next two entries together (entries with a common head term are ordered by alphabetizing by entry content), I won't update that.

There's an old children's song with the lines

No more pencils, no more bo-oks,
No more teachers' dirty lo-oks.

School is never out forever, never out completely. ``The learning society,'' ugh.

Cf. CPD.

CF is based on the ``like likes like'' idea. (That's not a direct quote; I just happened to like the symmetry of the expression.) Users are prompted to indicate their preferences for various documents or sites or what have you, and these preferences are recorded as a collection. Each new user belongs to a neighborhood (in the topological sense) determined by the degree of agreement of his preferences with other users. The system makes recommendations based on the idea that if you like the things I liked among those we've both viewed, then you will also like the things I liked among those you haven't viewed.

It had something over 30,000 vehicles in its fleet, and had 20,000 employees, 14,500 of them Teamsters.

In some cases, mere submission of an abstract guarantees an opportunity to present. It used to be that any APS member submitting one or more abstracts to a national conference of the APS was guaranteed the chance to present at least one poster. (That may still be the rule, but I'm not sure. It was a problem because the APS abstracts volume, distributed to APS members and anyone else attending an APS meeting, became the principal ``publication'' of crackpots who couldn't get their lunacy published elsewhere.)

Often, referees are under the impression that the papers of invited talks are guaranteed publication. I have never seen this stipulated explicitly by any proceedings editor, but it is an informal expectation and some allowances may be made.

The respectable assumption is that a submitted abstract describes the results of research that is completed or nearly completed, even though a paper describing the research has not yet been prepared. The reality is that abstracts are often submitted describing research not yet begun.

See C. R. Cook and P. S. P. Wang, ``A Chomsky hierarchy of isotonic array grammars and languages,'' Computer Graphics and Image Processing, vol. 8, pp. 144-152 (1978).

Don't they know the story of the boy who cried wolf?

This is a good place to discuss some of the less important differences between conferences in the humanities and social sciences, on the one hand, and engineering and sciences on the other. For brevity, we'll say humanities vs. sciences, but so far as I know the following applies about equally to social sciences and engineering, respectively. (My experience of attending talks in science and engineering is broad; my experience of social science and humanities talks is mainly restricted to the fields of human communications, politics, HPS, psychology, medieval studies, and classics.)

One difference is that humanities talks are really spoken papers. ``Speakers'' prepare papers and read them. In science, talks are talks. In practice, this difference is quite consequential, making and marking a difference in approach much greater than it might in principle imply. However, here we're talking about some ``less important differences,'' so we can't discuss that issue any further.

In all scholarly and would-be scholarly disciplines, talks are followed (and in various situations also interrupted) by questions or comments from the audience. In departmental talks (a single speaker for 50 minutes, say, and 10 min. discussion), discussion is usually handled informally. In a single-room conference, a session chairman or moderator may intervene more or less obtrusively, primarily to introduce speakers, make late announcements, keep things on schedule, etc. In a large conference with parallel sessions, keeping things on schedule becomes more important. (Keeping to schedule is quite a topic in itself, and I don't want to get into it here. Until I write an appropriate entry, however, let me mention here that in the March 2004 CJR there's an article by a presidential jokewriter that mentions getting Bill Clinton to use an egg timer. Vide etiam c.t., s.t.)

I once chaired a session that included a graduate student who gave a core dump of a talk. Most of her overheads consisted of unlabeled octal data. I don't know what the talk was about, but though it was in 1987, I can honestly say that I have not forgotten anything important. When her talk fell off the edge of the data and terminated, I called for questions. Unsurprisingly, none of the two-hundred-plus victims who were surviving there waiting for a later talk had any question to ask. Therefore I asked a question that I had conscientiously contrived in anticipation. That too is part of the chair's responsibility -- to get past any awkward potential silence. I watched decorously and paid no attention as she answered, mission accomplished.

A session chairman who traffic-manages questions from the audience or who ``gets things started'' represents about the greatest degree of intervention one is likely to encounter in the discussion following a scientific presentation.

In the humanities, things are different. Organizers of conferences, and of sessions within conferences, receive a great deal more praise for their activity, and their role is more prominent. To a scientist, it sometimes looks quite ostentatious and silly. In the discussion following a presentation, the mix of questions and comments is much more heavily skewed toward comments. If you've ever attended a university-sponsored movie (or worse -- gallery opening or play -- get me outta here!), you probably know what I mean. You remember in the discussion afterward (and possibly also before), supercilious jerks in tweed jackets asking ``questions'' to demonstrate their irrelevant knowledge, twisting their necks in William-F.-Buckleyesque fits of pretentious contemplation, and generally taking too long to utter what amount to no more than excuses for the speaker to puff on. I'm not going to tell you what I think of that.

Now where was I? Oh yes: conference sessions. (Often called ``panels'' in the humanities.) Not only is the role of organizer exalted, but even the task of appreciating the speakers' talks is exalted. Hence, there is sometimes a designated respondent or commenter for each paper; more often there is a single commenter for an entire panel. In the latter case, decorum dictates that all papers be acknowledged. The respondent has received advance copies of the talks (spoken papers, remember) and prepared five or ten minutes of commentary placing the papers in the context of recent scholarship and raising ostentatiously thoughtful questions for further discussion in the ``question-and-answer'' period. It's good form to find a common thread, preferably recondite, joining the papers so one can talk about how the talks ``illuminate different aspects'' of some issue or other. This isn't exactly a sinecure, but it is a bit of plum job, since it takes up as much real estate on an academic résumé as a real paper, but takes much less effort. So respondents are people favored by the conference or panel organizer, and there isn't really much call for a public call for commenters, but if there is I can assure you that at least once it has been abbreviated CFC. Usually it's a call for respondents.

Example of usage:

Terms & Conditions:
If your reservation is not canceled at least one day prior to pickup, you may be subject to a one-day rental charge. Tax and Surcharge rates are subject to change without notice. [SBF: !] Concession fees may be charged (where applicable) at airport locations. At many airport locations a consolidated facility charge (CFC) may also apply ($10/contract in California). A $5.00 per day U.S. Government imposed Administrative Rate Supplement (GARS/GA) will be added to all U.S. Government rentals.

For other film awards, see the AMPAS entry.

• FFS (Italian)
• SBB (German)
• VFF (Romansch)

This study examined the incidence of neckwear tightness among a group of 94 white-collar working men and the effect of a tight business-shirt collar and tie on the visual performance of 22 male subjects. Of the white-collar men measured, 67% were found to be wearing neckwear that was tighter than their neck circumference. The visual discrimination of the 22 subjects was evaluated using a critical flicker frequency (CFF) test. Results of the CFF test indicated that tight neckwear significantly decreased the visual performance of the subjects and that visual performance did not improve immediately when tight neckwear was removed.