E e

Cf. E_c, E_v.

The polygraph is an extremely effective technology. When administered on a person who is lying, a polygraph finding that the person is lying is correct over 90% of the time.

For all weight classes except Peewee, individual eggs are subject to a weight minimum: no egg must be so light that a dozen of the lightest would weigh less than one ounce below the minimum. Thus, for example, since a dozen of large eggs must weigh at least 24 ounces, the average weight of the eggs must be at least 2 ounces. Even the smallest eggs in the dozen, however, must weigh 24 -1 = 23 oz. per dozen, or 23/12 oz. apiece.

When you think about this, it's an interesting situation. Suppose that you are a chicken farmer (not a ``chicken rancher''!) and your chickens lay eggs with a mass distribution that is smooth on the scale of twelfths of an ounce. In fact, for simplicity, assume that the distribution is constant. That is, loosely speaking, assume your hens lay as many 23/12 ounce eggs as 24/12 oz. eggs and 25/12 oz eggs, etc. It's a reasonable assumption. Consider now how you would try to meet market demand for large eggs. You start with all the eggs that weigh anything under 26/12 oz., because you can't put any of those in any higher grade, and you certainly don't want to put them in a lower grade and make less money. In order to make more dozens, you continue to use all eggs that weigh less, right down to 23/12 ounces, the legal minimum for an individual egg in that grade.

By going down to the legal limit, are you being a greedy, conniving weasel (note the appropriateness of the metaphor)? Well, consider this: by using all of the eggs in the 26/12 to 23/12 range, and making the reasonable constant-distribution assumption, you can expect that the dozen carton of large eggs will have a total egg mass of 24.5 oz. Of course, the eggs are randomly distributed, and some of the cartons are going to end up with more than their fair share of lighter eggs. How often? Well the standard deviation about 24.5/12 or 50/24 oz., for a uniform distribution of width 3/12 = 1/4 ounce (from 23/12 to 26/12 oz.) is 1/sqrt(12) times the width, or about 0.0240 oz. Thus, the average exceeds the dozen minimum by 1.732 standard deviations (yes, in fact, by exactly sqrt(3) oz. if you take this kind of number seriously). This isn't really that much. Twelve is close enough to infinity for government work, so we can approximate the binomial probability distribution by a normal one, and we find that a few percent (you look it up in the tables!) are underweight. There are a bunch of things you can do about this, but you're on your own now because I'm bored.

If you want to know all about breakfast, then you ought to visit the salt entry too. For more on eggs, see the Abe entry.

It appears from the evidence of his diaries available here that Jean-Paul Sartre's earliest experiments in existential food involved the Denver omelet.

If you're still hungry for more information about eggs, see the .hu (for Hungary) entry. See also the France-related egg-content-positive entries on French toast and love. You can probably tell a lot about a person from the way they like their eggs. I'll have 'em over hard.

Together with Einleitung in die lateinische Philologie (1996), edited by Fritz Graf, EGP replaces Teubner's Einleitung in die Altertumswissenschaft.

Nowadays, afaik, tobacco smoking only occurs on private planes, and EGR is only used in its engineering sense. That refers to exhaust gas from an engine. This exhaust gas is hotter than the ambient air taken in. The elevated temperature of the exhaust gas represents a waste of fuel. One way to recover some of the loss is to run the exhaust gas through a heat exchanger (that's EGR) to preheat the fuel. In the case of gas turbines, EGR is used to heat the air after the combustion chamber has been filled. In either of these uses of EGR, compression of the fuel-air mixture is increased, hence increasing the work done by the engine.

Come to think of it, the mechanical engineering sense was the only one that was ever common.

	  d²
	m -- r = - gradV(r) .
	  dt²

If we can ignore spin, the corresponding quantum mechanical motion is described by Schrödinger's equation. For this quantum mechanical motion, a consequence that can be derived from the Schrödinger equation is Ehrenfest's theorem, which states that

	  d²
	m -- <r> = - < gradV > .
	  dt²

This does not mean that the average position obeys Newton's law, despite the resemblance. The reason is contained in a definition:

A statistician is a person who, standing with his feet in ice water and her hair on fire [hey, (s)he's just an average person], will declare:

``On average, I feel fine.''

In order for the average position <r(t)> to obey Newton's law precisely, it would be necessary for the right-hand side (r.h.s.) of the last equation (i.e., in Ehrenfest's theorem) to read -gradV(<r>) . Note carefully the ordering of operations: in Ehrenfest's theorem, gradV is evaluated first, then an average is computed; in the alternative version, the average of r would be computed first, then the potential would be evaluated at that averaged position. The computation of an average implies, speaking, the repeated evaluation of the quantity to be averaged.

Temperature	-----------	Feeling
		     ^
		     |
    hot		    Head	not fine at all
		     |
		     v
		-----------
		     ^
		     |
		     |
		     |
		     |
    ok		    Body	     fine
		     |
		     |
		     |
		     |
		     v
		-----------
		     ^
		     |
    cold	    Feet	not fine at all
		     |
		     v
		-----------

<Temperature> = ok		<Feeling> = not fine

The reflection barriers, combined with the increased probability of adatom binding at the inside (lower) edge of a crystal step between edges, lead to a growth instability: low-temperature growth is unstable against the formation of mounds, and becomes amorphous for sufficiently thick growth layers. Similarly, sputter etching can be unstable against the formation of deep pits.

``The Society also acts as a pressure group working to influence government policy in the interests of history, alongside other societies, such as the Social History Society, the Agricultural History Society, the Urban History Group and the Association of Business Historians, and in concert with professional bodies such as the Royal Historical Society, the Historical Association, the History in Universities Defence Group and the Academy of Learned Societies in Social Science. In addition, the Society regularly liases with funding bodies such as HEFCE, SHEFCE, the AHRB and the ESRC.

The EHS was founded in 1926, a good time to study a bad spot of economic history as it was happening. It's based in the UK and holds its meetings there, but ``is very keen to attract new overseas members as well as those from Britain.'' A subscription to EHS is included in the price of membership (GBP 21, as of 2004).

Occasionally, as in CEG's homepage, the first word in the name is written ``Electronic.'' Perhaps this reflects the aversion of North American Anglophones for plural attributive nouns, and a misconstrual of ``Electronics'' as a plural. More likely, perhaps, is an unconsidered reflex that two plurals never follow each other. The problem is that ``Electronic Industries'' can include radio broadcasters and accounting firms, in which electronic equipment is a tool but not a product or the reason for creating the product. Any radio program is an electronic transmission. A radio program about VLSI is an electronics transmission. Everyone knows this, so why am I belaboring the obvious? If everyone knows it, then why doesn't everyone, to say nothing of the EIA/CEG, get it right?

EIDE hard disks have > 528MB.

(Einstein didn't say ... .)

Although Irish Gaelic is the first official language of the country, most people now speak English. Gaelic is spoken mostly in rural areas, mostly along the west coast.

Here's an official copy of the Irish constitution.

Cf. Eis.

More on the interstate system at I-.

The awkward comprehensiveness of the longer name reminds me of Gulliver's report from the Academy of Lagado's School of Languages.

The first Project was to shorten Discourse by cutting Polysyllables into one, and leaving out Verbs and Participles, because in reality all things imaginable are but Nouns.

The other, was a Scheme for entirely abolishing all Words whatsoever; and this was urged as a great Advantage in Point of Health as well as Brevity. For it is plain, that every Word we speak is in some Degree a Diminution of our Lungs by Corrosion, and consequently contributes to the shortning of our Lives. An Expedient was therefore offered, that since Words are only Names for Things, it would be more convenient for all Men to carry about them, such Things as were necessary to express the particular Business they are to discourse on. And this Invention would certainly have taken Place, to the great Ease as well as Health of the Subject, if the Women in conjunction with the Vulgar and Illiterate had not threatned to raise a Rebellion, unless they might be allowed the Liberty to speak with their Tongues, after the manner of their Ancestors; such constant irreconcilable Enemies to Science are the common People. However, many of the most Learned and Wise adhere to the New Scheme of expressing themselves by Things, which hath only this Inconvenience attending it, that if a Man's Business be very great, and of various kinds, he must be obliged in Proportion to carry a greater bundle of Things upon his Back, unless he can afford one or two strong Servants to attend him. I have often beheld two of those Sages almost sinking under the Weight of their Packs, like Pedlars among us; who, when they met in the Streets, would lay down their Loads, open their Sacks, and hold Conversation for an Hour together; then put up their Implements, help each other to resume their Burthens, and take their Leave.

Stop me if I've told you this one before...

In Tokyo once, I looked on at the chance sidewalk encounter of two acquaintances. The men both bowed, then one bowed a tick lower, then the other insisted, rapidly bowing another tick lower. But no... This onedownsmanship went through a few iterations before they finally bowed their good-byes and moved on. Walking away, each man rubbed the small of his back.

In 2003, total health spending in Japan was only 7.6% of GDP, as against an OECD average of 8.1%. Also, despite a steady decline (from 76% in 1975 to 54% in 2000), the rate of smoking among Japanese men remains very high (second in the OECD only to Korean men). Yet in 2003, Japan also had the highest life expectancy among OECD countries. I can explain this paradox: it's the exercise.

I need a bobbing-toy entry.

Whether and how reliably that missing consonant might have been inserted is a somewhat ticklish question because it may already be in there. The dental alveolar plosives of Japanese are affricates to a greater or lesser degree when they precede i or u. Thus, the t series of sounds (in the ``fifty-sound table'' of Japanese) is {ta, chi, tsu, te, to}. The voiced version of this, the d series, is represented {da, ji, zu, de, do}. The zu syllable is really a voiced version of tsu, and really does sound like dzu... to a degree. I just spoke with a Japanese friend of mine, and to my ear she does clearly pronounce a dz cluster for this syllable, but the d is very slight. On the other hand, she grew up in Hiroshima, and I have read of the dz pronunciation of z as a specific feature of the Tôkyô dialect. (Granted that the dialect of Tôkyô has increasingly been the dominant or standard one since the advent of television, it has not extinguished the use of local vocabulary and pronunciation -- the pitch accent in particular has resisted standardization.) From what I can recollect of other Japanese I have known, I do think a stronger d sound in ``zu'' is probably more common in people from Tôkyô. Until I've asked some other Japanese friends, I'll stick with that.

It does happen that the s series of syllables, when voiced (i.e., when marked with the relevant diacritic), yields a z series {za, ji, zu, ze, zo} with a ji and zu graphically distinct from those in the d series. The ``zu'' in eizu is in fact written (in katakana) as a voiced su. That would appear to make much of the previous paragraph irrelevant, which is why I waited until this paragraph to mention it. But please read on.

As a practical matter, Japanese make no distinction in pronunciation between the zu sounds of voiced tsu and voiced su (as likewise between the ji sounds of voiced shi [of the s series] and voiced chi). That's why their Hepburn Romanizations are identical. Indeed, it's a source of inconsistent kana spellings. Anyway, I specifically asked to hear eizu pronounced. More theoretically, it appears that Ancient Japanese did not have a consonant s, but only ts. Hence, the Japanese zu sound ultimately developed as much from tsu as from su. (This absence of an independent /s/ in Japanese is somewhat paralleled by the absence of /z/ in Ancient Greek. The zeta representated an affricate /dz/ or /ds/. The letter z is pronounced /dz/ in Italian today, and in German, which has done a lot of devoicing over the centuries, z represents the affricate /ts/.)

Relevant, but too much of a burden for the previous paragraph: The voiced and unvoiced versions of Japanese consonants have historically been more like allophones than distinct phonemes. For example, a few centuries ago in Japanese, initial consonants tended to be devoiced, and the initial consonant of the second root in a compound tended to be voiced, etc. This accounts for many of the alternative pronunciations of individual kanji. English and German offer partial parallels or antiparallels. In modern German, for example, most final consonants are devoiced, and the initial s sound is always voiced (i.e., is pronounced /z/). Of course, local dialects offer exceptions and variants of these rules. In English the voiced/unvoiced pairs s/z and th/th (you can figure it out) were originally allophonic. While this is no longer generally the case, the -s inflections (as plural and possessive markers for nouns, and to indicate the third-person singular of nonmodal verbs in the present tense) are still voiced or devoiced according to the ending of the words they are attached to. (Generally, the voicing is assimilated: -s after a voiced consonant or vowel is pronounced /z/, even if the vowel is epenthetic, as in churches. Following unvoiced consonants, -s is pronounced /s/.) Aspiration of English stops is still completely allophonic, on the other hand, afaik.

Actually, I myself live in a toxic waste dump, but one of these years I plan to pass a vacuum cleaner over the accessible parts of the floor.

I'm waiting for Commodity Justice to become fashionable. It's just a crime that I can't have the same stuff rich people have. It's having a negative impact on my well-being, in particular my affective state. That in turn compromises my immune system, increasing my susceptibility to many fatal diseases. I need a federal luxury-supplementation program to save my life!

(And don't say you disagree. That's very stressful for me....)

Estimating (as well as defining membership in) the Jewish community is quite difficult, but 2 million is probably a fair estimate for all Europe. The largest Jewish community in Western Europe after WWII has been France, with 600,000 for decades. In apparent reaction to anti-Jewish violence that peaked in the Summer of 2001 but has continued, Jewish emigration to Israel (aliyah) rose to a level that has remained roughly constant (up to 2004, this writing) at about 2000 per year from France. This is most of the aliyah from western Europe as a whole.

The UK comes in second with roughly 300,000, and most other western and central European countries have much smaller Jewish populations: 40,000 Belgium, 30,000 Italy, and down. The Soviet Union was once estimated to have a couple of millions, mostly in the European part, but many of these emigrated to Israel when it finally became possible to do so without risking becoming stuck in the USSR as a refusenik. About 700,000 emigrated from the USSR and the countries that succeeded it between 1989 and 1995, and current estimates of the largest populations are 450,000 for Russia, 300,000 Ukraine, 50,000 Belarus. However, these numbers continue to shrink rapidly...

The exceptional case is Germany, where over half a million Jews lived before Hitler came to power, and where somehow there were 15,000 left by the end of WWII. By 1990, the Jewish population of reunited Germany had risen to 33,000. In a historic development, however, there has been a flood of Jewish emigration to Germany as part of a larger general emigration from the former Soviet Union. As of 2003, Germany had the third-largest Jewish community in Europe, with an estimated 200,000. In 2002, 19,262 Jews from the FSU settled in Germany. (In the same year, fewer than 10,000 emigrated to the US. Israel for the first time had fewer Jewish immigrants from the FSU than Germany did -- 18,878. This was down from about 44,000 in 2001. The decline, attributed to the Intifada, has continued, with the number down to about 10,000 in 2004.)

European Judaism: A Journal for the New Europe is published biannually in association with LBC-CJE and the Michael Goulston Educational Foundation.

There are, of course, other kinds of ray, translated by other Japanese terms. (For example, the fishy ray is an ei.) There are also other kanji with a reading sen. One sen is legal tender that you could toss on any Scrabble counter-top. It's worth its own entry.

Another Japanese word for X-ray is rentogen, after the discoverer. In German, X-rays are still called Röntgenstrahlen, but in Japanese almost as much as in English, the eponym has fallen out of use. Rentogen looks like an anagram of the alternate German name spelling Roentgen, but it's not so cute. ``Rentogen'' is the Romanization (according to the system of James Hepburn) of the Japanese spelling, which consists of five katakana characters.

Human infants can normally hear and distinguish far more sounds than adults can. As they learn language, they lose the ability to distinguish any two sounds, but they gain the ability to identify quickly what phoneme (i.e., which domain of sounds regarded as equivalent within the language) a sound corresponds to. In other words, they learn phonemics rather than phonetics. (More on that at emic.) A famous example is the r/l distinction: speakers of European languages typically distinguish at least one arr and at least one el sound. In contrast, Japanese and Chinese who do not, as children, learn a language that makes such a distinction tend to find it difficult to hear the difference.

For emphasis, let me restate this in contrast to a common misconception: It is well known that native speakers of Japanese and Chinese have difficulty learning to pronounce the r/l difference if they learn, say, English late (by late I mean no earlier than about 12 years of age). Many people think that this is fundamentally a difficulty in sound production, but that is not entirely the case: it is apparently at least partly a difference in brain wiring for language perception. Nerve connections in the infant that would have developed to process the difference have atrophied or not formed, and the brain capacity has been utilized differently. This happens to all speakers of all languages -- the only difference is that the particular set of abilities discarded and reinforced is different, according to the language[s] learned. For example, speakers of English have difficulty hearing the difference between aspirated and unaspirated sounds (b and bh, for example, in Hindi transliteration) or the difference between the sh sounds more carefully transliterated ``sh'' and ``shch'' from Russian. There are native speakers of German -- from some regions -- who don't distinguish between the ch of ich [/i:ç/ in the IPA] and the ch in German Bach [/bax/ in the IPA].

Some people learn to pronounce the r/l distinction reliably as adults, even without learning to hear the distinction reliably. This is the hard way, but sometimes it's the only way. (I know one such person well. From her speech I mightn't have realized that she can't hear the difference. When she hears a new word that contains an arr or el sound, however, she has to ask which sound it contains in order to know how to pronounce it.)

Chicago usage is a bit different; see L.

In December 1931, New Masses published (pp. 16-7) Langston Hughes's ``Advertisement for the Waldorf-Astoria.'' Hughes explained in In The Big Sea, (pp. 320-1) that the poem was ``modeled after an ad in Vanity Fair announcing the opening of New York's greatest hotel. (Where no Negroes worked and none were admitted as guests.)'' It's a bit of a downer, as poems go. Not upbeat at all. Here's an excerpt:

Don't you know they specialize in American cooking?
Ankle on down to 49th Street at Park Avenue. Get up
off that subway bench tonight with the evening POST
for cover! Come on out o' that flop-house! Stop shivering
your guts out all day on street corners under the El.

(I encountered an instance of the `L' spelling, also with a New York flop-house context, in a book from 1947. It's described at the L entry.)

Allen Ginsberg's ``Howl'' begins

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,
...

(The meter has been described as Whitmanesque; according to Ginsberg, ``[i]deally each line of 'Howl' is a single breath unit.'') Well, the first part of the poem was typed out ``madly in one afternoon'' in 1955 in San Francisco, where Ginsberg had been living since the previous year. But I think elevated trains (not counting the later BART system) are the one of the few forms of mass transportation San Francisco lacks, and until 1953 Ginsberg had spent most of his life in Patterson, New Jersey, and in New York City. It's not entirely crazy to adduce Ginsberg's poetry cautiously as evidence of linguistic usage. A personal acquaintance who influenced Ginsberg (particularly between 1948 and 1953) was William Carlos Williams, who urged Ginsberg to write in a more colloquial American idiom. Williams wrote an introduction for the first edition of `Howl.'

Although ``Howl'' made a big splash and Ginsberg a lot of money, the poem ``Kaddish for Naomi Ginsberg (1894-1956)'' is considered the better of his two greatest works. Kaddish is the name of a kind of doxology, which is recited (mostly in Aramaic) in a few versions at various points during Jewish services. One version (most of the full text, minus a sentence or two) is the ``Mourners' Kaddish,'' the characteristic prayer recited by immediate family of the deceased. I worked with a guy (David) whose family knew Allen Ginsberg's family back in the 1950's. David's mother objected to ``Kaddish,'' saying it was all true, but one shouldn't write it. (Naomi Ginsberg, Allen's mother, died after a long emotional decline through mental illness.) Always the bridesmaid. I know by email and have met in person someone who was once called a Stalinist, in print, by Noam Chomsky. (The journal did not publish his reply, though perhaps Chomsky's politics can be regarded as generally self-refuting and rebuttal superfluous.) Alas, always at least a couple of degrees of separation. I have a couple of letters from Albert Einstein...written to my late great uncle Fritz (mentioned at the ZNR entry).

Lawrence Ferlinghetti knew Allen Ginsberg at first hand. In 1956, Ferlinghetti's recently founded City Lights Books published Howl and Other Poems. United States Customs officers and the San Francisco police seized the edition and charged Ferlinghetti with publishing an obscene book. The court case, which ended in acquittal in 1957, established Ginsberg's national reputation. But Lawrence Ferlinghetti had already established his own reputation as someone who wrote poetry that mentioned the el. His 1955 work, ``20,'' began

The pennycandystore beyond the El 
           is where I first 
                                 fell in love 
                                                 with unreality

But the poem of Ferlinghetti that is all about ``the El / careening thru its thirdstory world / with its thirdstory people'' is ``12.''

Living in the nearby suburbs in the 1960's and 70's, and listening to news radio regularly, I never heard of any `el.' 'El no!

Robert Kelly (b. 1935) mentioned ``the El'' in at least a couple of poems, including one from 1981, but he's so preposterously prolific that it can't be very significant. In ``Skies'' (copyright 1992, Black Sparrow Pr.), he uh, sang

...in 1946 when he walked, not cold but certainly tired, all the way home from Fulton Street, at first under the el and then the open spaces where Sunrise Highway starts, then the other, smaller, older el on Liberty Avenue, where these city streets, smirched with scabby snow, felt clean and wonderful and...

Ah, poetry!

You know, if you look up poetry on the basis of just about any nonaesthetic principle, you find a lot of really bad stuff. In 1974, I think, Daniel Hoffman (b. 1923) wrote ``Stop the Deathwish! Stop It! Stop!'' There he mourns the loss of once-useful knowledge:

is there many a man around who knows
by rote the dismantled stations of the El,

Later he observes that by then, ``about as few use rhyme as wigwag....''

The El is habit-forming. Of the poets and poetasts mentioned above, all with the possible exception of Ginsberg mentioned the el in at least two works, as have Angela Jackson, Jerome Rothenberg, and Constance Urdang.

In Spanish, un elevado is, in a traffic context, `an overpass.'

I haven't encountered or invented a good term for the phenomenon or for persons so elected, but I think of them as ``elected tyrants.'' Here I understand the word tyrant in the original sense of the word tyrannos. As explained at the linked entry, the word originally meant `usurper' -- someone who took power by irregular means (usually by force or menace). This did not necessarily imply that the ruler was widely unpopular or generally ignoble. Holinshed wrote of the historical Macbeth:

To be briefe, such were the woorthie dooings and princelie acts of this Mackbeth in the administration of the realme, that if he had atteined therevnto by rightfull means, and continued in vprightnesse of iustice as he began, till the end of his reigne, he might well haue béene numbred amongest the most noble princes that anie where had reigned.

The term ``elected tyrant'' is bound to be interpreted at first blush as equivalent to ``elected dictator'' -- someone elected to hold dictatorial powers. Too bad. ``Usurper'' sounds a bit too monarchial. The entry's gotta have a head term.

The question of legitimacy, and whether authority is duly constituted, is a very difficult one to address in the general case. Broadly, I agree with the careful wording of Jefferson, that governments derive ``their just powers from the consent of the governed.'' Consent expressed through free elections to offices defined by agreed law, however, confer a higher order of legitimacy than does the sullen or fearful resignation of those without hope of overthrowing hated rulers. For this entry I limit consideration to the modern era, so I needn't puzzle over the Roman Senate's endorsement of every Caesar proclaimed by the Praetorian Guard.

Jefferson's formulation implicitly contains a vague notion of majority or plurality, since universal consent rarely occurs (unless one lowers the bar of ``consent'' to ``absence of active resistance''). Modern constitutions vary in how they deal with the absence of majority agreement. It may be considered an unsolved problem. For my purposes, someone who comes to power by legitimate (or constitutional) means, either by direct election or by an indirect election that voters understood beforehand to have the effect of putting a winner in power, is ``elected.''

Within the modern era, I also ignore elections rigged by, say, systematic miscounting or exclusion of legitimate candidates. This can be a fuzzy line to draw, since not just an election but an entire electoral system is often rigged by limits on free speech and free assembly. My interest is in situations where the electorate had a real opportunity to reject or punish tyrants, and did not do so. Neither do I condemn such popular choices generally. The election of an executive is a blunt instrument for the expression of popular will, and voters compromise.

Tyrants (in the sense of this entry) often atempt to ``legitimate'' their rule ex post facto, by changing the constitution and whatnot. Like I care.

This entry will be visibly under construction. For any missing details, you know how to search.

• Argentina: Juan Domingo Perón. Col. Perón was part of a successful military coup in May 1943, and subsequently served in cabinet positions. Opponents within the military forced his resignation (he was by then Vice President and Secretary of War) on October 9, 1945; soon afterwards he was arrested. He was released on October 16, after mass demonstrations organized by the CGT (the main federation of unions). (On the 25th, he married Evita.) On February 24, 1946, he was elected president for the first time. After some changes in the constitution in 1949, he was reelected in 1951. A civil war in 1955 pushed him out of office. (Civilian supporters and opponents of Perón both had some of the military on their side. The tanks had different colors of paint splashed on them so the sides could tell each other apart. A few hundred noncombatants were killed and injured in this little war, including a filled school bus, if I remember correctly.) The effort to remove him started in June, and he left in September. Over the next 18 years there was a succession of military governments, interspersed with short-lived civilian ones. The last military takeover of the 1960's took place in 1966, and in a March 1971 palace coup within the military government, Gen. Alejandro Lanusse came to power. He decided to restore ``institutional democracy'' (democracia institucional, as they called it, as opposed to democratic government by milicos) in 1973. There were calls for Perón's return, but his participation was forbidden. Héctor José Cámpora ran with peronist support and was elected on March 11, 1973. He resigned from office on June 13, clearing the way for new elections in which Perón ran with his third wife (Isabelita) as running mate (in the English political sense). They won, he died on July 1, 1974, and she was ousted in a military coup on March 24, 1976.
• Chile: Augusto Pinochet.
• Germany: Adolf Hitler.
• Ghana: Jerry Rawlings. One ``minor mutiny'' against the military government in 1979; released from prison and made leader of a coup two weeks later (June 4); relinquished power to elected civilian government in September 1979; overthrew that same government Dec. 31, 1981; headed military governments of Ghana continuously until 1992, when he allowed elections. In the November 4 elections, he was elected president with 59% of the vote. He became the president of Ghana the following January 7, and went on to become the first president to serve out the entire term for which he had been elected. He was reelected in December 1996 with 57% of the vote, against 40% for John Kufuor. Kufuor was elected president in December 2000, and reelected in 2004. (An interesting feature of his career is that the coup that put him in power took place two weeks before elections, scheduled a year before, that were planned to return the country to civilian rule. He allowed the elections but announced that civilian rule would be delayed while he cleaned house.
• Nicaragua: Daniel Ortega Saavedra.
• Paraguay: vague recollection, have to check.
• Venezuela: Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías. Hugo Chávez led a failed military coup in February 1992. He was imprisoned, then pardoned and released in 1994. In 1998 he was elected president for the first time.

None of this explains why it wasn't the second Wednesday in November, but there you go -- it has to occur on some date.

Of course, Behaviourism ``works''. So does torture. Give me a no-nonsense, down-to-earth behaviourist, a few drugs, and simple electrical appliances, and in six months I will have him reciting the Athanasian Creed in public.

Another point of comparison between the two movies is that the Woody character in Sleeper was named Miles Monroe. That doesn't sound like a comparison, does it. Just wait, I wasn't finished. The name Monroe recalls James Monroe, fifth president of the US. Whether one is thinking of American history or not, the first person with the given name Miles that one is likely to think of is Miles Standish, a ship captain best remembered for not getting the girl. In Bananas, the Allen character is Fielding Mellish. Mellish suggests nebbish, a Yiddish word for an earnest, ineffectual loser. As you know, the -ish ending in English, like -like, contains the idea of approximation. It may thus imply imperfection, or failure to achieve.

``Miles Davis''? He's history.

Certain unusual first names convey a certain sense of aspiration. This is manifestly clear in the case of names commemorating a famous person (e.g., George Washington, John Wesley, Martin Luther, Henry Fielding). Foreign names, and names more commonly occurring as surnames, also have this effect. Depending on how things play out, such a name may have an inspiring or even a demoralizing effect on the bearer, and may convey prestige, pretentiousness, or some other impression. A given name Fielding, followed by Mellish, will suggest to some a pretentious hope unfulfilled. In the movie, Fielding's parents still hope that he'll become a surgeon like his father, even though it is clear to others, such as a patient, that his ideal career path may lie in other directions.

The Woody Allen character doesn't measure up to his name, just as the little tramp, Charlie Chaplin failed to measure up to his ill-fitting clothes. A name is an identity: what you are called is in some measure who you are. Whether the power of names was deemed mystical or psychological (I'm lapsing into freshman-essayese here, aren't I) names have long been manipulated as tools of personal growth (forgive me, you know I didn't invent that phrase). Often the name change is minor. For example, a nickname may be substituted for the formal version of a name. James Earl Carter, Jr. used ``Jimmy'' from the beginning of his political life. He apparently never had his name legally changed to Jimmy, so in 1976 he was obliged to go to court to assure that his name appeared as Jimmy Carter on the national presidential ballots. The original name was particularly infelicitous after 1968, as the murderer of Martin Luther King, Jr. was James Earl Ray. (Some questionable history anent political nicknames and their advantages here.) Other ways to make a minor change include having a new name that is an extension or apparent modified version of the original (e.g., Abram to Abraham) or a change of emphasis (Thomas Woodrow Wilson to Woodrow Wilson).

Major name changes are also associated with major turns in a person's life. John Rosenberg abandoned his wife and kids and changed his name to Werner Erhard. I suppose this may have been convenient. He invented the name Werner Erhard after reading an article on West Germany in Esquire magazine which mentioned Werner Heisenberg and Ludwig Erhard (then the FRG economics minister). He later went on to found est.

I'm going to type Werner Erhardt here for people like me who can't remember the exact spelling, so they'll get a prophylactic hit on the search engine. And Jack Rosenberg for good measure.

In MST3K, there was a character named Dr. Lawrence Erhardt (yeah, with a final tee). An FAQ explains that Josh Weinstein came up with the name on the basis of Werner Erhard, with Lawrence chosen for its pretentiousness. JW thought it had an evil ring. What, he was thinking maybe of Lawrence Welk? (And-a one and-a two, Ig-or!) Josh Weinstein was one of the original creators of the show, writing and doing the voice of Dr. Larry Erhardt and some other characters in the first two seasons. Larry Erhardt disappeared abruptly when JW left, and was eaten by a giant spider in a later episode.

He was credited as J. Elvis Weinstein. If your name is Joshua and you think that's too pretentious, you can use Josh, a homonym of a word meaning kid, joke.

Josh Phillip Weinstein played a hippie in Mars Attacks! (1996). This is also a science fiction piece, a spoof of 1950's alien-invasion movies. What is it about that name?

I am not going to spell out why I am reminded of John Aristotle Phillips, but he's mentioned in the CANDU entry.

More on names at the Nomenclature is destiny entry. More on bananas at the potassium (K) entry. More on Woody Allen's Sleeper at the health entry.

(Charlie Chaplin's screen pants were too large, but his jacket was too tight. Look for my Ph.D. dissertation on the deeper significances of this.)

Once on MST3K, the robot companion Tom Servo remarked ``Emby Mellay? That's not a name, it's a bad Scrabble hand!'' What is that, a reverse rebus? Eye dialect hits the big time!

Voltage (E) in an inductor (L) is ahead of current (i) [by 90° of phase].

Current (i) in a capacitor (C) precedes voltage (e) [by 90° of phase].

The Cardona group has a 500-word introduction.

This faq is associated with the comp.mail.elm newsgroup.

Élodie is also a common-enough woman's name in French. From its Visigothic roots, it can be interpreted to mean `foreign riches.' My understanding is that the correct spelling uses initial É and not E, but the instances I can find instantly, of the personal name, all use plain E.

I find this apparent coyness about acronym expansions irritating. It occurs with acronyms in all languages I've had any substantial experience of, but Francophones seem to take greater liberties in divorcing acronyms from their expansions. See, for another example, fémis.

The newsiest application of ELODIE has been in the successful search for exoplanet. In 2006, it is being succeeded in this role by SOPHIE. Sophie is also a woman's name, but this SOPHIE has an unobscure expansion.

``The National Human Genome Research Institute's (NHGRI) Ethical, Legal and Social Implications (ELSI) Program was established in 1990 as an integral part of the Human Genome Project (HGP) to foster basic and applied research and support outreach. The ELSI program funds and manages studies related to the ethical, legal and social implications of genetic and genomic research, and supports workshops, research consortia and policy conferences related to these topics. The ELSI program at NHGRI is the largest supporter nationwide of ELSI research.''

This reminds me of the line attributed to LBJ (regarding FBI director-for-life J. Edgar Hoover), that it was ``probably better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.'' (This appeared in the NYTimes on October 31, 1971; I have no idea whether it's accurate.) For more LBJ mots, apocryphal and canonical, see the Veep entry.

The first systems, mandated by many countries in the 1970's, transmitted analog signals at 121.5 MHz.

New digital systems under development will transmit digital bursts of information at 406 MHz.

Sometimes the term is used rather loosely. For example, the University of Manchester offers an M.Ed. in ELT. My personal experience is that when I took a cab from the Manchester airport, the driver understood me but I did not understand him. I had more success in the shops in town, and a friend of mine is a Mancunian/English bilingual, with a smattering of ancestral Ukrainian. Well, in case you had any doubt, this information is useless.

Go to their site and hear the music for ``Your Teddy Bear'' sounding like it's being played by an Oktoberfest accordion.

Pressure studies by George Samara demonstrated that EL2 is an antisite defect.

In 1998, popular Senator and war-hero Daniel Inouye ran to represent Hawaii for a seventh term. It's hard to find anyone in his or her right mind to challenge in such an election. His Republican opponent was someone named Crystal Young, who has said she has been disabled since having electromagnetic needles implanted by Shirley MacLaine. Shirley MacLaine has denied the allegation. I'm not sure exactly what role this allegation played in the campaign, but Inouye was reelected with 79 percent of the vote. (Young had 18 percent.) Inouye raised $981,000 to Young's $37.29, demonstrating that Young was able to get a whopping factor of 5994 more votes per dollar than the incumbent. Newsface logic: Obviously there was a groundswell of disaffection with Inouye.

Code Phrase	Meaning
I hated the course!	I took the course.
I loved the course!	We weren't required to actually master any of the material, so the instructor just came in and chatted about stuff.
It was easy but boring.	I'm confused. We're talking about Electronic Circuits 101, right?
The book wasn't written for humans!	It was a standard textbook that's been used by tens of thousands of students.
The book wasn't written by a human!	The author understood the material.
The book was really, really terrible!	I hated the course, but the instructor is my advisor.
The TA's did a really bad job!	I hated the course, but the instructor is my advisor and he wrote the textbook.
The instructor assumed that we knew all kinds of obscure mathematics!	The syllabus assumed we remembered mathematics taught in the prerequisite courses.
The course was harder than P-Chem.	I'm a chemistry major. I took this course by mistake.
This course wasn't any harder than P-Chem.	I'm not a chemistry major. I'm just bragging that I took P-Chem anyway.
I aced the course.	The number of students who understood even less than I did was too large to fail en mass.
I hated the instructor!	The course had an instructor.

Cf. anticline entry.

In the Yes song ``I've Seen All Good People,'' Jon Anderson repeatedly sings

Send an instant comment to me.

Email is a poor medium for finding out that someone has died. Okay, maybe there's no good medium for communicating such information, if it can't be in person, but I'm still in shock. (Don't worry, it probably wasn't anyone you knew.)

Here's some useful information that is almost certain to be of no use to anyone who reads it here first: There are servers that provide webpages via email. One of these is at the address agora@dna.affrc.go.jp. For example, the two-line message (in the email body, not the subject line)

SEND
http://www.plexoft.com/SBF/E03.html

Send the message

HELP

The word mail is an uncountable noun. A countable unit of mail is usually described by a more restrictive term like letter, postcard, parcel or package. Some people feel that email should likewise be exclusively uncountable, but there is no convenient, concise, generally accepted accurate term meaning `email message.' Therefore, following common usage, I also use email countably in that sense. Similar issues occur with the French courriel and mél (deprecated).

In her novel La maison de Claudine (1922), Colette wrote

C'est seulement une fois que je vis, un matin, la cuisine froide, la casserole d'émail bleu pendue au mur, que je sentis proche la fin de ma mère.

Tooth enamel is émail des dents and about 95% mineral matter.

Some Old French spellings of the word had an ess: esmal (ca. 1140) and esmail (1260). The word is ultimately cognate with the English verb smelt. The Old French word is presumed to have entered English in Anglo-French forms *amil, *amail. The common attested form was ultimately amel, which did not become obsolete until the eighteenth century. Enamel was originally a verb like encrust, describing the placing of amel (and in the other example, originally precious-metal crust). The verb eventually took over the sense of the noun, as if the verb enamel had simply been a verbed noun. Something not too different happened with embroidery (French broderie).

German spelling is fairly reliably phonetic. However, foreign loans, particularly from French, preserve something like their original pronunciation until (more like unless) naturalized. Educated speakers are not being pretentious but merely correct when they pronounce Restaurant with a final nasalized ``aw.'' Some dictionaries offer a phonetic transcription with the ng nasal, which is not too far wrong and which probably corresponds to less well-educated speech. In Swedish, restaurant is spelled restaurang. Reflecting the French pronunciation, Email is pronounced the way a native word spelled Emai would be.

• Eudora (Now redirects to Lycos Mail, 3GB free storage.)
• Gmail (Google mail. Google got into the free email business into 2004 -- relatively late, but they were far from being the first search engine also -- and they have grown fast. As of April 2008 they had 101 million email users, according to the research firm comScore Inc., and had gained over 30 million users over the preceding year. Google offered 1 gigabyte of free storage per account when they entered the market; as of June 2008 they were offering over 6 gigabytes.)
• Hotmail (One of the first such services, still among the most popular; now owned by Microsoft. Comes with 5 GB of free storage.)
• hushmail (touts security)
• Mail.com
• MixMail (Spanish-language service from ya.com. Ya means `already.')
• RocketMail (In 1997 Yahoo bought Four11 Corp. for $80 million. The rocketmail domain was part of the acquisition, and rocketmail users at the time of the acquisition were allowed to keep their existing accounts and email addresses. Shortly after the acquisition, Yahoo started offering free email accounts assigning addresses in the yahoo.com domain. As of April 2008, according to the research firm comScore Inc., Yahoo was the email market leader, with 266 million users worldwide. [Microsoft, whose final offer of $47.5 billion to purchase Yahoo was rejected at the end of that month, was a close second at 264 million users.] With so many accounts, new subscribers have been finding it harder to come up with satisfactory userids. To address this problem, Yahoo began to register new addresses under the rocketmail.com and ymail.com domains around noon PDT on Thursday, June 19, 2008.)
  You know, a Notre Dame running back named Raghib Ismael was nicknamed ``Rocket Ismail'' for his speed. He went hardship. I recall that at the time he said that he valued education and planned to finish his degree, but I haven't seen him around campus. He played for the Toronto Argonauts of the Canadian Football League (CFL) for a while, for the Carolina Panthers 1996-1998, and signed with the Dallas Cowboys in 1999. Cowboys owner Jerry Johnson said ``We've been criticized internally, as well as externally, about our speed situation, and he addresses that.''
• RocketIsmail (when I edited this entry in July 2000, this domain name wasn't taken -- for free email or anything -- but it looked like tabnet.com might be holding it for ransom. Checked back June 2008: it's free; it's just not there.)
  Raghib's brother Qadry is nicknamed ``the Missile.'' One of the now less common meanings of the word missile, still preserved in cognates like missal and missive, is message or letter. More about rockets at the V-2 entry.
  The US Postal Service (USPS) sponsored bike racing teams; Lance Armstrong was their big star.
• TechEmail (``now partnered'' with Everyone.net, which isn't free)
• weed mail (what, all the good names were taken?)
• Yahoo (As of Summer 2008, it is also registering email addresses in the ymail.com and rocketmail.com domains, under the same terms and with the same features as addresses in the yahoo.com domain. When Yahoo started offering email accounts in 1997, they came with 3 megabytes of free storage. As of 2008, they offer ``unlimited'' storage.)
• Zap Zone Network (ZZN).

A large number of internet organizations offer free email as a sideline or as a way of delivering their service or advertising. These are sometimes restricted to an interest group or region, and a lot are just using services provided by the major providers listed above. Some examples: BMX (byke.com, used to be ZZN-powered), britannica.com, CNN ("powered by" mail.com), gURLmAIL (according to terms of service, ``[u]ser verifies that she is at least 13 years of age,'' but not that that ``she'' is female -- possibly because that would be illegal; partly run by WhoWhere, which owns Mail.com), Let's Go Mets Email - Official Email of the New York Mets, Wong Faye (don't ask me, free email seems to be one of the exciting features that pop star web sites can offer; "powered by outblaze").

What can you do with all these free email addresses? You can go to ACrushOnYou.com, register under some pseudonym, and have a message sent to some guy that someone has a crush on him. He has to visit the site and try to guess who (i.e., what email address) sent this secret-admirer note. There's no ``I give up -- who was it?'' button.

What's in it for the victim? He learns a lot about himself. Take me, for instance. After the most obvious addies (I'll allow myself to use such ugly slang on this occasion because stress seeks release in profanity), and then the most desirable (``has she recently changed email address?'' I wonder in a hopeful panic), I next tried those of all the cute women I have good reason to believe hate me, and finally the lesbians. I still haven't tried the ones I'm really (I mean really) not interested in. Uh-oh, but now the heavy Angst begins: is it my girlfriend, testing me with a forged addy? Do I have to mention this to her or lose her trust and more important privileges? If it isn't her, will I screw things up worse by mentioning it? Who is the opportunity I am passing up? Is it just some guy, like on alt.singles.sex.on-usenet-transvestitism-is-just-a-cryptic-userid-away?

(No, I haven't used gender-inclusive language. Mutatis mutandis, I suppose.)

Okay, now I've started on the undesirables/inappropriates. When the cgi takes a long time to reply (``X Sorry you guessed incorrectly''), I wait with increasing horror that this time I'm loading that feared large data chunk. Still no hint from the GF pro tem.

In one of Kurt Vonnegut's stories, the hero wins a cosmic prize (a combination cattish pet and self-cleaning crock pot) and then tries to find his way back to his real world by visiting various possible worlds in order of decreasing probability. Finding his own world uncongenial, he continues on to worlds of negative probability. I'm going to start guessing random email addresses. Eventually I'll make up my own new TLD's. Who knows? I might win a cosmic prize.

[A similar (prize-winner/spacetime-traveler) plot device is used in a 1972 TV mélange of Vonnegut bits called Between Time and Timbuktu. There the prize is better motivated -- a nebbish wins a trip into the good ol' chronosynclastic infundibulum by writing the best jingle for some Tang-like product (I mean a product sleazily joint-marketed with space exploration).]

Incidentally, a good way to learn about more potential free email addresses is to read the return addresses on your spam. Of course, the more email addresses you have, the more spam, and the more spam...

Au Bon Pain is a chain of bakery/cafes.

For other information about emergency candies, read the warning under Medical Calorie (a subhead of the calorie entry).

Not to be confused with the emic-etic distinction.

The effect was illustrated by Doctor Fun in a file that used, alas, to be available online.

Back in the 80's, there were special commands for ``parking'' (moving into a position safe for transport) the magnetic heads (read and write) on floppy disk drives. Nowadays, those commands are executed automatically in a normal shut-down. If power is lost unexpectedly, then the energy stored in rotational kinetic energy of the disk and rotor part of the drive are recovered as EMF and used to park the heads.

Boy, I hope this isn't how electroglottography (EGG) works.

You can read more on electromyography at the On-line Medical Dictionary.

Roughly speaking, phonetics studies speech sounds as such, whereas phonemics studies speech sounds within the framework of understanding of a particular group of speakers. One might identify phonetics and phonemics as objective and subjective, respectively, but this is not quite accurate. The range of sounds that are represented in English as ``the sound of the letter p'' constitute a single phoneme. From a phonetic perspective, however, one may distinguish unaspirated /p/, which is pronounced at the ends of words, and aspirated /p^h/, which occurs in the initial position (medial p pronunciation depends on speaker dialect and adjacent sounds within the word). People whose first language is a European tongue other than Greek tend not to be specifically conscious of aspiration, but the difference is easy to detect manually, so to speak:

Hold your hand a few inches from your mouth and pronounce the words in and pin. If you speak an ordinary dialect of English, you should feel a puff of air (the aspiration) from the initial p. You will not feel a similar puff from the unaspirated final p in nip.

Aspiration typically is phonemically distinguished in languages of the Indian subcontinent, and is typically indicated in transliteration by the addition of an aitch. Thus dharma and Boddhisatva, etc. Semitic languages also generally make a distinction. In the Ashkenazi (roughly the Northern European) pronunciation of Hebrew, not surprisingly, much of the distinction was lost. (In particular, the aleph and ayin are indistinguishable.)

For further examples, see the el entry.

Incidentally, the plagiarism of a Tony Blair speech by Senator Biden of Delaware isn't the only instance of trans-Atlantic PIP theft. The British Labour party created its own Emily's List and named it ``Emily's List.'' For US Republican or conservative versions, see RENEW.

The name Emmy is derived from Immy, nickname image orthicon tube. The variant Emmy was used because the award statuette looked more like woman (albeit a winged one) than a vacuum tube. You can read a longer version of the story at this page sponsored by NY-NATAS.

The HowStuffWorks website has some pages explaining ``How the Emmy Awards Work.'' They work? I didn't know! What kind of ``achievement'' were they supposed to honor, exactly?

I don't know if it's a heresy, merely, or an entirely new gospel, but an article in volume 40, number 2 (April 2004) was entitled ``God Can Even Speak through Meetings.'' The same wild-eyed provocation artist, John C. Kerr, has a more thoughtful-seeming piece in the same issue: ``Could Poverty Be a Blessing?'' This is pretty subversive stuff. I mean, by the very title he's planting the seed of the idea that poverty might not be a blessing. What is he, crazy? What is a mere sixty years and ten [or twenty-five years and ten (2003 est.) -- he's writing about Zambia] against eternity? Better to starve now: a cadaverously skinny camel has a better chance of making it through the eye of a needle (lightly greased, of course).

In Yiddish, mama lashon is a common and somewhat shmaltzy term meaning `mother tongue.' I guess Yiddish azoi Mama Lashon'' would be the term corresponding to ``English as a Mother Tongue.''

A common strategy in propaganda or PR for such a technology and its department is to shine in the reflected glory of some technology that is currently sexier. For example, did you know that copper plumbing is an enabling technology for computers? It's true: without indoor plumbing, computer programmers would die of thirst or water-borne diseases.

The Latin spelling, of course, is preserved in the Latin titles of various long-established encyclopedias like the Encyclopædia Britannica, (EB), Encyclopædia Londinensis, etc. It's also preserved because monkey see, monkey do (it's an important principle of spelling standardization). For example, I have before me (actually to the left of the keyboard) a ratty copy of How To Clean Everything: the Encyclopaedia of Home Care. It was first published in the US in 1952, but my 1972 British edition has ``corrections'' copyrighted by the British publisher. I wonder if a respelling of encyclopedia was one of the corrections.

The practice of giving encyclopedias Latin names when approximately no one knows Latin is a great opportunity for mischief, often of the literally barbarous kind. There is, for example, an Encyclopedia [sic] Americana. The EB is now divided into a Propædia, Macropædia, and Micropædia. The EB people have also put together an inferior Spanish encyclopedia called Enciclopedia Hispánica, which includes a volume called Temapedia (at least both roots are Greek) and one whose spine writhes with the words ``DATAPEDIA y Atlas.''

In German, the letter c when followed by a letter other than h has had the sound value /ts/ for at least a couple of centuries. (That's why the Scottish ancestor of Immanuel Kant had to change his name from Cant.) The letter z has the same sound value, and during the twentieth century, spellings in z replaced those in c. Thus Encyclopédie, borrowed from the French, was initially spelled Encyklopädie in German and later Enzyklopädie. [Of course, c still occurs in German. It is part of the symbols ch, ck, sch, dsch, and tsch, to say nothing of Nietzsche, and it persists in unnaturalized spellings like Camping, Décolleté, and decrescendo, and incompletely naturalized words like decodieren and Ressourcen. (Even words with unnaturalized spellings obey native German capitalization conventions and may have altogether unnatural naturalized inflected forms.) By common agreement among the governments of German-speaking nations (and cantons), naturalized spellings will be encouraged. Some new approved spellings, however -- like Dekolletee -- rather tear the envelope than push it.]

Here's something interesting, the interpretation of which I do not suggest is immediate: Fukuyama was a student of Allan Bloom's at Cornell and a graduate student in comparative literature at Yale, where he studied under Paul de Man.

One line in that song is ``I can barely see the road from the heat comin' off.'' This refers to the wet, shimmery, or mirror-like appearance that hot roads can have. Here's a picture of what I'm talking about:

As is clear from the foreground, the shoulder of the road is bounded on the outside by grass in sandy soil. The lighter colors of the soil and grass mean that it both absorbs and emits radiation more slowly than the black road surface. The leaves of grass also function as cooling fins, promoting cooling by conduction to, and convection in, the air. The combined effect is that at the end of an August day (like that on which I took this picture), the grass is pretty much at the temperature of the air, but the road is much hotter. The optical effect is clear in the distance, where the grass seems to rise above and over the road (see especially the grass on the left side). The car in the distance appears to be floating on air. In fact, the apparent flat bottom of the car is also an illusion: it's a reflected image of the top of the car.

The illusion has to do with the fact that the refractive index of air is not quite unity (the vacuum value). Warm air is less dense -- more like a vacuum, say -- and its index of refraction is lower, closer to unity. This causes reflection. The air layer is smooth, so reflection from it produces a mirror effect. What one sees in that mirror depends on what is beyond it. It may be darker and look like a wet spot or, as in the picture, it may be a lighter-colored hazy sky that looks like it ends below ground level. Since the warm air that produces the effect is lighter than the surrounding air, it is buoyant; with a hot-enough road, the air moves visibly and produces a shimmering effect.

Technically, the reflection off hot air is total internal reflection (i.e., reflection by a region of low index of refraction back into a region of high index). The effect is very simply described by Snell's law, that for a beam of light traversing a change in refractive index n, at angle relative to the direction of index change:

n×sin() is a constant.

Total internal reflection occurs because sin() cannot increase beyond 1, so a decrease in n cannot always be compensated by an increase in .

You can use these facts, with some obvious approximations, to estimate the temperature of a reflecting road surface. Suppose you're on a long hot road, with no trees in the distance, so you can tell where total internal reflection appears. You can measure this distance from road markers, odometer, or speedometer and elapsed time. Call the distance L, and the height of your eyes above the road surface h. (It doesn't matter if you're on a long steady incline -- h should be the normal distance of your eyes from the road surface, and probably doesn't change much on an incline.) Then, if you're on earth, L is probably much larger than h, and sin() is about 1 - 0.5 (h/L)².

The index of refraction of any atmospheric gas is pretty close to unity, and the first correction should be proportional to 1/T, so say
n = 1 + c/T.
We now write
n₁×sin(₁) = n₂×sin(₂),
where the subscript 1 refers to you and subscript 2 refers to the road. When total internal reflection begins, sin(₂) is exactly unity. Substituting the quantities discussed for the other sine, and retaining only the lowest-order terms,
2c/T₂ = 2c/T₁ - (h/L)².

Hmmm. Looks like we could use some extra information here. The value of c, f'rinstance. Let's say that for air in the optical range of wavelengths, c = 0.08K. Alright then: The road temperature T₂ is given by T₂ = 1 /( 1/T₁ - (h/L)²/0.16K). Thus, if the temperature in the car (which determines the apparent direction of the line of sight) is 25 degrees Celsius, or about 300K, you're at 1 m height and the mirage begins at an apparent distance of 100 meters, the road surface is at 369K or 96 degrees C, about hot enough to boil water. Good thing tires are vulcanized.

The Keirsey Temperament and Character Web Site offers to categorize you. The trouble with its character sorter (a very good name, BTW, in that it doesn't imply ``testing'' and the associated possibility of failure) is that most multiple-choice answers are caricatures of mature thought.

England in Transition: Life and Work in the Eighteenth Century is a little Pelican paperback (a Penguin imprint) by M. Dorothy George (née Gordon, so she didn't have to change her monograms). As the cover explains, it's a ``social history of England immediately before the Industrial Revolution, describing vividly the evils as well as the attractions of the so-called `Golden Age.'' The book evolved out of a series of BBC broadcast talks that the author gave in 1930; the book was published in 1931 and republished with additions in 1953.

(You'll want to know that on my copy (1953), the print along the binding is upside down when the book is laid face up.)

When I was working at Fermilab (1977), I used to spend my free time at the recreation center conducting experiments on the mechanics of collisions of hard spheres rolling on felt-covered slate. (I was that dedicated.) Once I asked a British fellow experimenter there what they called english in England. ``Spin!'' he replied angrily. I did not.

At least he didn't give me the look. Most Englishwomen and some Englishmen apparently learn the look in school. The look is a physiognomic achievement at the cusp of disdain: just enough directed attention to express contempt, but not so much as to suggest the target is worthy of attention. I am usually too impressed to be offended. For more on this kind of stuff, see the swarthy entry. (I mean the entry for the word swarthy.) For ruminations on dourness, read my cri de coeur at the SHS entry.

For other yrast national skills, see pen spinning.

I used to have a link here to the image archive at Washington University in Saint Louis, where there was an image named <the_look.jpg>. The archive is long since defunct, but you can do a Google image search for the_look.jpg and find a selection. Click the link! Haven't you figured it out yet? I have no idea which, if any of these, I originally had in mind.

For yet more abuse, FPT.

ENL, however, has the unfortunate property of being something close to its own antonym: see the preceding entry. ENL in the sense of the current entry seems to be especially common (though probably not prevalent) in Indiana.

The machine was planned for use in WWII, but it wasn't completed until 1945 (I think it was unveiled on Valentine's Day 1946). It was succeeded by the EDVAC.

The FOLDOC entry for ENIAC is now extensively footnoted, and seems to have settled on what exactly was von Neumann's contribution to the ENIAC/EDVAC project.

The mailing address is in Oak Brook, Illinois, identical with the WNRS. Different extension on the phone number. Related to the ASNR.

Bretagne here refers to Brittany, not Britain. By Brittany I mean a place, not a person.

[BTW: an otorhinolaryngologist deals with the health of throat, ears, and nose. These are connected.]

The scheme was created by a couple of geniuses (see MBTI) who based their work on the limpid writings of Karl Jung.

It used to be more common in English to say that a firearm ``discharged,'' where now we'd say ``fired'' (or misfired'') or ``went off.'' In Spanish, the verb disparar describes the action of various things that shoot or are shot, including gunmen, guns, and projectiles of various descriptions (incl. soccer balls).

A week later, in the July 17 Daily Telegraph (London), Andrew Marr wrote about poor neglected Gore Vidal:

He has not only perfected the dry narrative style that I call sardony, but has the grand cadences of the old East Coast aristocracy, now rarely heard. His best story, I thought, was passed on by a friend, who says that Mr Bush, after a tense phone call to Paris about the stand-off on trade, slammed down the receiver, turned to his aides and complained: "You know the trouble with the French? They don't even have a word for entrepreneur."

That was practically the last time the story was provenanced in any way. Marr's story, incidentally, was a ramble entitled ``Why I was a bloody mess over Brown's spending review notebook.'' Brown was Gordon Brown, and the following year, the Diary feature of the Glasgow Herald claimed that they had reported it some months earlier as ``told by Gordon Brown at a showbiz reception where he informed a fellow Scot of a G7 meeting at which French president Jacques Chirac bemoaned the economic climate adversely affecting France's competitive edge. A listening George Bush turned to Tony Blair and murmured: `The problem with the French is that they don't have a word for entrepreneur.' ''

I couldn't find that report, but I did see that in the Herald of August 1, 2002, Dr. Ian Morris, replying to a letter in part

I agree with Iain Scott about entrepreneurs and like the comment made by George W. Bush. The French are backward compared with America. They do not even have a word for entrepreneur. Apocryphal?

It was amusing to see in a fawning puff piece on Sir Terence Conran (by Ginny Dougary in the September 14 London Times) how he ``heartily disapproves of Blair's support of the Bush administration, snorting with derision at dubya's gaffe, `The problem with the French is that they don't have a word for entrepreneur,' and is maddened by the two leaders' response to terrorism.''

By the end of the year, the quote had received the imprimatur of the Oxford Dictionary publishers. It didn't just make their list of 100 top quotes of 2002; it was quote of the year.

Ha! But English doesn't have a native word for dirigisme, so there!

Oh wait -- it was a font problem. Babelfish translates ``the entrepreneur's enterprising contractor'' (in English) as l'entrepreneur entreprenant de l'entrepreneur. This is fun! ``The female entrepreneur's enterprising contractor'' becomes l'entrepreneur entreprenant de l'entrepreneur féminin! Let's try ``male prostitute'' ... prostituée masculine. I don't think so. I may have to find a more reliable informant.

Oh great! I found another French translation dictionary in the house. Taschenwörterbuch der französischen und deutschen Sprache (the sixth revised edition, 1911 -- back in the day when Herr Professor G. Langenscheidt actually controlled the Langenscheidt press. This dusty tome translates Unternehmer (English `entrepreneur'; take my word, I checked the Duden Deutschesuniversalwörterbuch) as entrepreneur. With the translation of English enterprising as entreprenant, the evidence is beginning to accumulate: French does have at least one word meaning entrepreneur: the word entrepreneur. However, the French word has a broader meaning than the same string literal in English, so French may not have a word specifically meaning the same thing as the English word entrepreneur. I'm guessing it doesn't have a common one, unless something shows up soon. In summary, entrepreneur is entrepreneur, but the French word goes a little heavy on the je ne sais quoi. Once again, dubya's enemies have misunderestimated his superior linguistic prowess.

Typical materials: KTP, KD*P, LiNbO₃, LiTaO₃.

The bandwidth for local calls is much larger than for longer-distance calls. Thus, there's little point to a 19.2 modem unless you're dialing up a nearby computer. Make that a 33K modem. No wait, better 56K, yeah. Oh, is DSL available in our area now?

It's probably not fruitful to examine the precise implications of either term. The reality is that the terminology and the research associated with it are usually based on certain approximations or ethnic assumptions. In many contexts, EO and ELL are really just neutral-sounding ways of saying non-Hispanic and Hispanic, or something like it. What ``Hispanic'' means is similarly approximate. You'd like to think that these approximations or stereotypes are recognized as such by researchers, but I have reasons to doubt it. One reason is that published research frequently fails to explain how the grouping was done, as if this were unproblematic. Another reason is personal experience. For example, a friend of mine was apparently awarded funding (for study in a graduate psychology program) at least partly on the basis of his self-description as Hispanic. When he showed up to start school and they discovered that he has white skin and speaks without a foreign accent, some on the faculty felt they had been deceived. They had apparently wanted and expected someone who looked and sounded ``Hispanic.'' They were certainly deceived -- by their own ignorance.

The alternative EEOE is very useful if you're trying to even up your line lengths with a nonproportional font.

That's excepted, not accepted!

Grivas later commanded the Greek Cypriot National Guard until he was recalled by the Greek government. In 1971 he secretly reentered Cyprus and created EOKA B to restart the struggle for unification. Grivas died in January 1974 and Makarios officially proscribed EOKA B in April. That Summer Makarios was ousted, and Turkish troops invaded and partitioned the island.

Back in 1994 or so, I met an incoming EE graduate student from Malawi (.mw), who was surprised I had heard of his Parameceum-shaped country. Under the generally benevolent dictatorship of Hastings Banda, that southern African country was politically nonaligned (in contrast with the most prominent members of the Nonaligned movement, which were aligned against the West). Malawi also happened, unusually for the region, to achieve national self-sufficiency in food. Eventually you're going to wonder -- why am I telling you this at the EP entry? Go ahead, wonder. Once the soccer team of this tiny nation beat the Egyptian national team, sending Egyptians to their atlases in droves, at least in the imagination of Malawians.

Malawi's neighbors were all, sooner or later, Soviet clients in the Cold War. They received advisors, and various kinds of aid and advanced technological equipment. Many southern Africans, particularly those who received scholarships to Russian universities, must have learned Russian. At the college in Malawi attended by the EE student mentioned above, it happened in the early 1990's that there was a need to get a translation of a Russian technical manual. They called around to cities in the various neighboring countries, but couldn't find anyone who claimed to know Russian.

They apparently have a ``Green PC'' program, and are pushing for a goal of less than 30 W power consumption for a computer in stand-by mode. I haven't tried to track this down.

Okay, okay: epenthesis is the insertion or the development of a letter within the body of a word. It typically refers to such letters arising between the components (bases and affixes) of a word. Examples include the Latin words monitor and monstrum. Both have the stem of the verb monere (`to warn') and a suffix. The first suffix, -tor, is a well-known agentive ending, here attached with an epenthetic -i-. The second suffix, with the sense of `accomplishing' or `with,' has as its simplest forms -ter, -tra, and -trum (in masc., fem., and neut., resp.), obviously following a first-second declension pattern. The epenthetic -s- was common following n, e, or i. (Demonstrate is derived from monstrum, the latter in the sense of `portent.')

Epenthesis also, less frequently, refers to insertions elsewhere than between the component morphemes of a word. Epenthesis in the dead (yes, dead) languages is noticeable primarily through spelling. In living languages, epenthesis may more often refer to sounds rather than letters. A good example of both of these points is athlete pronounced as ``athuhlete.''

Here are some examples of epenthetic consonants:

12. Congolese, Togolese
    I can't find another instance in English of an -ese adjective ending immediately preceded by an epenthetic l. All the most common -lese adjectives, as well as the less common I can find, are constructed from nouns or adjectives ending in l: Senegalese, Nepalese, Cinghalese/Sinhalese/Singhalese, Marshallese, Tyrolese (Tyrolean is much more common), Bengalese (Bengali is much more common), Angolese (Angolan is much more common), legalese, journalese, novelese, officialese.
14. Balinese, Faronese, Javanese, NASAnese
    Apart from these, -nese adjectives associated with peoples or regions are typically formed from nouns that end in n (Bhutanese, Cantonese, Ceylonese, Japanese, Milanese, Nipponese, Pekinese [Pekingese], Sudanese, Taiwanese) or by shortening of the source nouns to roots that end in n (Chinese and Indo-Chinese, Guyanese, Veronese, Viennese). Lebanese would count as a more extreme instance of the latter case. The construction of Faronese involves some shortening, of course (Faroe Islands), but I'm not sure if the lost e represents a change in pronunciation of the vowel. I suppose one might argue that Javanese is really constructed from the adjective Javan. If so, it would represent a different kind of exception, in not being constructed from a noun as is usual.
18. aileron
    This is constructed in the French from aile (`wing') and the diminutive ending -on.
19. demonstrate, monster
    The -s- was inserted in Latin; see epenthesis.
20. agiotage, egotism, egotist
    The -t- comes from French, where its insertion seems to be modeled on pairs like ballot and ballotage (the t is silent in the first word but pronounced in the second). For an unusual instance that is somehow of German origin, see terrariatology.

But this isn't just useful in Scrabble,^® you know. Late in the nineteenth century, S. Nagai extracted an alkaloid (2-methylamino-1-phenylpropanol) from Ephedra vulgaris, naming it ephedrine in 1887. (The initial extraction yielded too little of the chemical for much analysis. Nowadays the preferred source is E. sinica.) Another common alkaloid in many Ephra species is pseudoephedrine.

The name ephedra of the plant source was coined on the basis of the Greek ephédra, `sitting upon,' from epí (`upon,' in various senses) + hédra (`seat, base'). [I think that's because it's a squat plant, but I'm not sure. It would be unpleasant to sit upon.]

Anyway, ephedrine is a stimulant that in some of its pharmacological action resembles adrenaline. The name of the hormone adrenaline comes from the fact that it was first extracted from adrenal glands. The adrenal glands sit atop the kidneys (renes in Latin), hence the name. By a similar etymology, the adrenal glands were also called suprarenal glands, and adrenalin called suprarenin. In addition to these Latin constructions, there is a Greek one, from epí (`upon,' remember?) + nephrós (`kidney'), whence epinephrine.

In other words, epinephrine and ephedrine have similar action and similar names, but the name similarities are mostly accidental. The initial e's come from a common root epí, though this is almost arbitrary. The ``ph'' in ephedrine represents aspiration from the second word applied to the pi of the first (with the iota elided before the initial vowel of the second word), while the ``ph'' in epinephrine is from the Greek word for kidney. The ``ine'' is the only noncoincidental element: it indicates that the substances are alkaloids, and many pharmacologically active substances are alkaloids.

Actually, the chemical structures of ephedrine and epinephrine are somewhat similar as well. The epinephrine entry has my ASCII art for both the epinephrine and ephedrine molecules.

It's been suggested to me that the acronym should be EPIIA, and that in that case the acronym is misalphabetized. Maybe it should be, but contrariwise it isn't, so it's not. That's logic.

``EPICS uses Client/Server and Publish/Subscribe techniques to communicate between the various computers. Most servers (called Input/Output Controllers or IOCs) perform real-world I/O and local control tasks, and publish this information to clients using the Channel Access (CA) network protocol. CA is specially designed for the kind of high bandwidth, soft real-time networking applications that EPICS is used for, and is one reason why it can be used to build a control system comprising hundreds of computers.''

  H---O           O---H
       \         /
        \       /
         C-----C
        /  ___  \
       /  /   \  \
  H---C  (     )  C---H
       \  \___/  /
        \       /
         C-----C     O---H
        /       \   /
       /         \ /
      H           C     H
                 / \   /
                /   \ /
               H     C
                    / \
                   /   \ 
              H---N     H
                  |
                  |
                  CH
                    3

For comparison, here's ephedrine. The linked entry also goes into excessive detail (for your convenience, of course) on the etymologies of these similar names.

      H           H
       \         /
        \       /
         C-----C
        /  ___  \
       /  /   \  \
  H---C  (     )  C---H
       \  \___/  /
        \       /
         C-----C     O---H
        /       \   /
       /         \ /
      H           C     H
                 / \   /
                /   \ /
               H     C
                    / \
                   /   \ 
              H---N     CH
                  |       3
                  |
                  CH
                    3

Obviously, both of the molecules above are optically active. If you think I'm going to try to represent the stereoisometry, you must be doing drugs.