E e

Silicon Integration Initiative (Si²) has placed online a Glossary of Standards.

Without further ado, then (don't complain; I went through a lot of grief for this entry), it means `Turkish Academy of Esthetic Dentistry.' That's the apparently universal translation, anyway. Or rather, it is the English name that is normally abbreviated EDAD in cosmetic-dentistry contexts. Some of the Turkish name -- the first and third words -- is pretty obvious. The second word in the Turkish name means `dental surgery.' So far, so good. The last word -- whose meaning is possibly not obvious to waggers of any Indo-European tongue -- does not mean `Turkish.' Despite the standard English version, it's pretty clear that there's no Turk or Turkish or national or patriotic or home or Turkey or even turkey in any literal translation.

In fact, the last word seems redundant to me, but I don't happen to know Turkish. I do know that the Türk Akustik Dernegi is the `Turkish Acoustical Society' and that Bilimsel Arastιrmalar Dernegi is Turkey's `Association for Scientific Research,' and that there are a bunch of similarly named entities. Yet Akademisi Dernegi is a frequent collocation, to judge from ghits. It is frequently translated `Academy Society' or `Academic Association' (but never `Academic Society' or `Academic Association'). As this doesn't make sense in English, while I suspect the original makes sense in Turkish, I doubt it's an accurate translation. True bilinguals are avoiding the more fluent translations with Academic... I don't know what to think. In financial contexts, the word dernek means `corporation,' but it does not appear that our original means `Academy of Esthetic Dental Surgery, Incorporated.' I guess I'll try to track down someone who might know.

Dr. Galip Gürel, the founder and current (2008) president of EDAD, is a noted auto racer. So I've read.

At the ed-school entry, I already typed in bibliographical information for a book by Koerner, so to save myself the effort of typing in any more, I'm going to use that as my only reference. According to information on pp. 180ff, for a long time the highest degree in Education was the customary Ph.D. ``But with the coming of progressivism and the `professionalizing' of school administration, pressures from the field against the rigor and alleged narrowness of the Ph.D. made themselves felt. What was needed, said the new educationist, was a `field-oriented' doctorate for educational administrators not concerned with original research but with practical school problems and with the application of research findings to concrete situations. With Harvard, California, and Temple University leading the way, a new doctorate to satisfy these demands was inaugurated, and by the end of the 1930's was solidly established in about 25 institutions.''

The latest data available when Kroener was writing was from 1960-62. At the time, there were about a hundred US institutions awarding some kind of doctorate of education. A few of these still awarded only the Ph.D., and most of those awarding the Ed.D. also awarded the Ph.D. But by that time the Ed.D. had become the principal doctorate in Education: 1000 of 1500 doctorates awarded annually.

Kramer argued that the theoretical distinction between Ed.D. and Ph.D. has evaporated in practice. He explained the role and the relative popularity of the Ed.D. in language you won't likely find on an ed-school's website. ``The reasons for the popularity of the Ed.D. are plain enough. It is an easier degree than the Ph.D. Course work for it is often entirely in Education (the Ph.D. used to be attacked as narrow!), it carries no foreign language requirements [that's not so distinctive any more], it usually carries no dissertation requirement, and control over it is usually vested entirely in the Education division of the university -- meaning that advisors from the academic departments are not invoved in the candidates' programs and that the doctoral standards of the arts and sciences division do not have to be met. At Teachers College, for example, the Ph.D. often requires, among other things, that academic faculty from Columbia University approve doctoral dissertations and participate in doctoral oral examinations. This creates onerous problems, for the University representatives often feel that they cannot in good conscience accept the low standards of either the dissertation or the oral exam, in contast to the Teachers College representatives[,] who are anxious to acccept both; on the other hand it is extremely awkward to flunk numerous doctoral candidates at that stage.... It did not take the Teachers College faculty or students long, however, to learn that it was much safer and easier to go the Ed.D. route, along which there were few encounters with the University faculty, with the result that Teachers College now gives 7 or 8 Ed.D.'s for every Ph.D.''

I'm gonna put a link 'ere to MEng, but you unnerstan I'm not makin no commint or nuthin.

A corresponding German mnemonic is Eine Alte Dumme Ganz Hat Eier (`an old dumb goose has eggs'). Observe the recurrence of the themes of stupidity, the GI tract, and the unexpected. Oh yeah, the aitch -- in German the tone B is represented by H, at least in part because the flat symbol not only resembles lower-case b (particular in the once-standard Fraktur-style fonts) too closely but is called by the name of the letter.

Cf. Every Good Boy.

From first string to sixth string of a guitar is two octaves, or twenty-four half-steps. If the pitch difference were exactly five half-tones between every pair of adjacent strings, then there'd be one half-tone in excess. Instead, there is only four half-tones separation between the fourth and fifth strings (G and B). (Thus, when the guitar is tuned to itself, the lower string at the fifth fret resonates with the higher string -- except when the B string is tuned to the G string: fourth fret.) One advantage of placing the deficient separation at the fourth string is that this way, every open string is part of the C-major scale and it is possible to step through the entire C-major scale without having to use any fret higher than the third.

(For convenience above, I refer to the strings in order of increasing pitch -- the order in which they are named. Normal numbering for discussing guitar and probably all lute-family strings is in the opposite direction: upwards in position. So G and B strings are third and second. This information is repeated in slightly different words at the EBGDAE entry, so why don't you go there for a review?)

This kind of scandal could never happen in the US, because Edexcel sounds so much like Edsel that no one would use it.

The sinking of the Titanic three years earlier is sometimes described as a contributing factor in the Eastland disaster: after it was learned that there weren't enough lifeboats on the Titanic, laws were passed requiring enough lifeboats for all passengers. The Eastland added lifeboats, evidently raising the center of mass.

Standards for EDI are ASC X12 and UN/EDIFACT, which are in the process of harmonization.

Harbinger markets TrustedLink Enterprise -- EDI translation and communications software. It seems to be Windows-NT-based, but runs on the major non-PC Unix dialects as well as godforsaken IBM MVS. There's now even EDI/400 for the AS/400.

Edith (let's use that name) was originally established to give shareholders in private companies a way to sell a part of their stake in more easily traded (UK) equity. Shareholders would exchange their shares for those of Edith. The trust held these shares as long-term investments. The Edith shares could then be sold to meet death duties and other liabilities. The trust limited itself to minority stakes and did not disturb control of the companies in which it invested.

The trust was originally created by ICFC in 1952. (It was not on the London Exchange until 1962, but that wouldn't have prevented OTC sales of Edith stock.) ICFC held the largest minority share and continued to provide management for Edith. In 1984, 3i (which ICFC had become a part of) (re)absorbed it. (In 1999, 3i itself was taken public.)

1. The act of editing.
2. The result of editing.

2. ' All the books printed from a single setting of type.

3. An individual press run.

The problem with all of this is that it's being overtaken by events. I set type in junior high school, and it's a messy chore. Things have been cleaned up and computerized quite a bit, but for the most part, one still somehow sets blocks of what will be printed, so the notion is still valid. The problems come when small changes become easy. In desktop publishing, the traditional notion of a bibliographic edition more or less evaporates. Books are still published using technology that resists incremental changes, but new technologies are chipping away at this (no, I can't name one off the top of my head, I read it somewhere), and of course, the capacity of desk-top publishing advances with (non-press) printer technology.

From an interview conducted in 1975 or perhaps a bit earlier and published in Conversations with Elie Wiesel, p. 92. ``HJC'' is Harry James Cargas, the interviewer.

HJC: It seems impossible that you could work with an editor.
EW: I don't work with an editor. When I give a book to a publisher they don't change a word. To work with an editor is only an American institution. This is not so in Europe. There a writer must give the full book to the publisher. If he's not capable of doing that, he's not a writer--at least that was so in my time. Now it may be changed. America has influenced Europe, not the other way around. Here, when my book comes to the American publisher, it's already a finished product, simply to be translated [from French].

[Wiesel's first work, the nonfiction Night, was written in Yiddish (the title, in transliteration, was Un di Velt Hot Geshvign, `And the World Kept Silent') and published in Buenos Aires in 1956 by Tsentral-Farband fun Poylishe Yidn in Argentine. The versions published in other languages are based on a French condensation that he wrote afterwards. As far as I know, all his novels and other extended writing has been done in French.

Traditionally, at least in the US, you or your agent could sell a nonfiction book to a publisher on the basis of a more or less detailed proposal and either a chapter or your established reputation. Some nonfiction projects are suggested by editors to authors they'd like to have do them. Fiction is generally sold (and more usually not sold) on the basis of the completed work. Editors may request changes. The changes may be extensive.]

  A consequence of being well known in Bengal has meant [sic] that it has been easier for me to publish most of my English-language books from India also. Two books of poetry have been published from Calcutta and two academic books from Delhi. In India there are still no middlemen between authors and publishers, everything being done through informal personal contacts. As a result, I have never acquired the experience of dealing with an agent. Here [in Britain] even agents seem to have their agents, a situation that scares me. I have never registered with an agent. The case-history of the publication of A Various Universe, the book based on my doctoral work, may be of interest here. I sent it first to OUP here. Their reader was very enthusiastic and recommended some changes. I made the changes according to his suggestions and submitted the MS again. This time OUP sent the MS out to a new reader, who proposed some radical changes in the arrangement of material. The book would have to be totally restructured. I took the MS and gave it to Vikas at Delhi. OUP Delhi's general manager at the time, whom I knew slightly from my undergraduate days at Oxford, came to know of this, retrieved the MS from Vikas and decided, over a weekend, that he would publish it. In the end OUP Oxford took 500 copies of the first imprint for sale in Britain, but because my contract was with OUP Delhi my royalty on all copies sold was on the Indian price only.

[The author was born in 1940; it seems this book, subtitled ``a study of the journals and memoirs of British men and women in the Indian subcontinent, 1765-1856,'' was published in 1978. Vikas Publishing House was founded in 1969.]

Historically, the name Edo has been transliterated as Yedo or the equivalent by some foreign visitors. For a bit more on that, see the yen entry.

Here's a description from Charles Evans & Associates.

Every few years, a fitful effort is made to improve the quality of US teachers. Just as a little reminder that this has been going on a while, here are details of a book I dug up during the excavation of a closet:

The Miseducation of American Teachers, by James D. Koerner. With an introduction by Sterling M. McMurrin, former United States Commissioner of Education.

I could tell you when it was published, but it wouldn't have the impact of the dust jacket. The author picture is a black-and-white passport picture of the squinting author in a 1962 haircut, the kind that causes your head to repel your ears. The price is $6.95. Okay, I'll tell you: copyright 1963. Mick Jagger turned twenty on July 26 of that year -- that's how long ago it was.

Ah, but wait: here's a more recent title... Ed School Follies: The Miseducation of America's Teachers (New York: The Free Press, 1991), by Rita Kramer. Time, at least, marches on.

Not just anyone can buy an .edu domain. You have to satisfy criteria set by EDUCAUSE, the sole registrar for the the domain. The US Department of Commerce awarded management of the domain to EDUCAUSE, or Educause, a ``university technology consortium'' in October 2001. Management is subject to a cooperative agreement with the DoC.

Eligibility conditions are described at this page. Before Educause took over management, the domain was available almost exclusively to four-year colleges and universities in the US. By agreement with the DoC, all institutions that had an .edu domain as of October 29, 2001 were grandfathered in, and keep their domain names regardless of eligibility. In addition to the non-US institutions mentioned above, there were other exceptions such as the Smithsonian Institution and the National Academy Press. A major expansion in eligibility, implemented shortly after Educause took over, was to community colleges, which are accredited by the same regional groups as the four-year institutions. By early 2003, about 7500 were assigned to about 6000 schools.

A dreadful new expansion was announced February 11, 2003, to take effect April 15, 2003 (rather than the more appropriate April 1). After a period of public comment in which 95% of response was favorable (can you say ``parti pris''? sure you can!), Educause decided to extend eligibility to all schools approved by specialty accreditation organizations recognized by the US Department of Education. Bible Colleges, Beauty Colleges, Hair Design Institutes, the American Film Institute... all the riff-raff is welcome.

Here's a list of riff, raff, and some other ``national institutional and specialized accrediting bodies that accredit institutions'' that will be eligible for .edu domains:

• Accreditation Commission for Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine.

In the Canadian province of Ontario, .edu. is a third-level domain. For example, the Halton Catholic District has <haltonrc.edu.on.ca>.

American Education is so defective in theory and practice as seriously to threaten the long continuance of the way of life to further which this nation was founded.

The WWW Virtual Library has an EE index. LookSmart has a small page of EE links that does not include the SBF glossary.

The Home Page of the Chair of Classical Philology, Tartu University, maintained by the electrifyingly named Ivo Volt.

Outcomes vary greatly -- roughly a third of people contracting the disease recover with no or minimal long-term consequences, a third survive with severe neurological damage, and a third die. Severity is said to vary between different outbreaks, however, and fatality rates as high as 70% have been reported. (It seems to me, though, that this apparent variation would be expected just from the small-number statistics and sampling bias.) Early symptoms are highly nonspecific (they include high fever, chills, stiff neck, headache, and fatigue); during the 2005 outbreak described below, roughly 250 people had been tested for EEE virus before there were three positives.

Rates of infection tend to peak for a few years and then subside for a couple of decades. There was an outbreak in New England in 2004, following no cases in 2002 and 2003. In Massachusetts alone it infected four people and killed two in 2004 (there were also seven equine cases). It has killed two so far (I write on September 8) in 2005.

It's transmitted by mosquitoes. The fraction of mosquitoes that carry the virus grows over the Summer, so infection rates tend to peak in September. The specific mosquito of concern is Culiseta melanura, which primarily gets the virus by biting birds.

In many cases, the sound represented by the ``K'' is an unvoiced glottal stop (the ``EE'' is choked off sharply). That's why ``EEP!'' may be virtually equivalent. The Semitic languages (at least Hebrew and Arabic) have alphabetic symbols for glottal stops; European languages generally manage without. Japanese uses a small version of a kana for tsu to represent the glottal stop at the end of eh or ah. Normally, the small tsu (called sukuon) is used to indicate a geminate consonant. For example, the kana sequence (ni, small tsu, po, n) would be transliterated as ``Nippon.''

Of course, some people actually pronounce ``EEK!'' or ``EEP!'' with a /k/ or /p/. Killjoys.

Just taking a wild guess, I suspect that ``kroon'' does not refer to human mating calls, but is a cognate of crown.

Visit this description served by Christopher Walker.

Gerard tells me that there was an uproar in England back when the Thatcher government announced that the cost of room and board for university students would no longer be borne by the government (though of course tuition would continue to be `free').

Fabra.

That fact is so poetic that I should probably leave the entry at that, but I have to say that this reminds me of the English word practical. In India, the word is used primarily in the restricted sense of `financially pragmatic.' (I guess I already mentioned this at the ALARP entry. What, did you forget already?)

Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but payment in full is even more sincerely appreciated.

In Polish, forsa is slang for money, dough, bread, you dig? Various cognates of English force begin with forso-. This is certainly suggestive, but I have some more investigating to do.

EFF is at the forefront of the battle against net censorship.

To say that language is efficient is to say that in general its patterning is such that communication may take place -- but while the linguistic system is in general an efficient one (else how could human beings learn and use such a complex pattern?) it is also clear from the study of language itself as well as from language change, that the system is in certain respects not maximally efficient (or maximally simple or [maximally] economical). Language is efficient -- or else it would not survive and would be replaced by other, more efficient systems.

Et, as the saying goes, cetera. I hope that Dr. Waugh found the study of efficiency in language rewarding as well as interesting (and how can one help but be interested in something so rewarding?). (And how else can one be rewarded except through interest?) But I doubt it.

EFL is pronounced `EE-ful.' Voice that and it's ``evil.'' Either way it may be awful.

The acronym EFL is currently somewhat more common than ESL, but both terms are well known. If you make no semantic distinction between the two, and have no particular preference, then here is one reason to avoid EFL and use ESL or even ESOL. The initialism ENL stands for both English as a Native Language and English as a New Language. EFL is subject to a similar confusion: it is also used in the sense of ``English as a First Language.'' It's quite rare, but not rare enough. I've even seen joking (I think) instances of EFL expanded with fourth and fifth. Same problem with FLA: it's a dangerous world out there for acronyms.

Many people do make a technical distinction between EFL and ESL, but it is not always the same distinction. A relatively common one is as follows: EFL tends to involve homogeneous classes, with students having a common language that the instructor may know and use to a (very) variable degree. ESL, in contrast, tends to refer to more heterogeneous student group, probably of foreigners taught in an English-speaking country. In this case, the instruction must evidently be more of an immersion.

The terms EFL and ESL emerged in the aftermath of WWII, and the distinction between EFL and ESL arose out of the observation that English-language study in some situations was differed significantly from the familiar situation of school-study of foreign language in school. ``Foreign language,'' FL, and EFL referred to the familiar school situation. ``Second Language,'' SL, and ESL referred to situations in which the language being learned was somehow not foreign. The two main cases were of those learning English (a) as students in former British colonies and in the Philippines and Puerto Rico, and (b) as non-native speakers resident in English-speaking countries. Because the general situations of (a) and (b) were initially more relevant in Britain and North America, respectively, there arose a difference in usage on opposite sides of the Atlantic. This probably contributed to some of the confusion and ambiguity in the use of these terms.

Lying behind the distinction between ESL and EFL are theories, well-articulated or not, regarding how familiar English is, and how it is used, when it is not an entirely foreign language. This is a subject of research, some of it good and empirical, and a very little bit of which will eventually be described at the entry for taxonomies of English language use. Both EFL and ESL are part of the taxonomies of Moag and Judd, to be discussed there.

The earliest mention of tree hugging that I am aware of -- the locus classicus, perhaps -- is the sixties song ``Draggin' The Line.'' In context, it appears to have a double meaning: simultaneously a celebration of nature (``diggin' the rain and the snow and the bright sunshine'') and a technique for aerial power- or communication-cable hanging that might be regarded as cable sustained by a sustainable problem-solving technique.

Don't you hate these recursive extended metaphors? You don't?! Okay buddy, you asked for it: visit XARA.

EFTA has also frequently been expanded European Free Trade Area. The German translation that I have seen is Europäische Freihandelszone, meaning `European free trade zone.'

EFTA has various joint declarations on cooperation (JDC's) and bilateral free trade agreements FTA's. See also EEA.

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.

Supposedly, heu is an equivalent interjection, but all the classicists I know seem to write only ``eheu.''

	  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!

This made me laugh out loud. Another thing you can't have in a democratic society, or any other one, is an ``elite'' that constitutes a quarter of the adult population.

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.

1. Noun, with stress on first syllable, meaning ``entryway'' or ``act of entering.''
2. Verb, with stress on second syllable, meaning ``put into a trance.''

• Old short answer: tennis elbow.
• New short answer: cell-phone elbow.
• Long answer: Painful inflammation of the muscles and soft tissues around an epicondyle. You know what an epicondyle is, don't you? No? Then how do you expect to understand this definition?! An epicondyle is a projection on a bone above a condyle serving for the attachment of muscles and ligaments. I suppose now you'll want to know what a condyle is. It's a round bump on a bone where it forms a joint with another bone. It should have meant ``a knitted garment with a multicolored diamond pattern,'' but that was taken.