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Absolute temperature, measured in Fahrenheit degrees, is the Rankine scale. The globalizing bulldozer of standardization ruthlessly crushes the fragile flower of mensuration diversity. Visit our memorial entry for an extinguished victim of this remorseless social Darwinism: °R.

To determine the temperature Fahrenheit from cricket chirping, divide the number of chirps per minute by four and add forty. This is according to Polly's Ghost, a novel by Abby Frucht. Apparently crickets don't chirp at temperatures below 40°F. Or maybe they chirp in reverse. At 55°F they should be chirping at 1 Hz. If we were serious about precision, we'd measure temperature in chirps per minute instead of Fahrenheit degrees (never mind Celsius.)

I should probably mention that Fahrenheit didn't just fool with choosing among essentially equivalent schemes for designating temperatures. His major contribution to thermometry was overcoming technical obstacles to developing a good mercury (Hg) thermometer. His mercury thermometer was substantially more accurate than existing alcohol thermometers. He took into account the effects of glass expansion (and discovered that different kinds of glass had fractionally different expansion coefficients). He also discovered that the boiling point of water depends on pressure.

Nevertheless, the intriguing, almost enigmatic question about Fahrenheit is: how did he come up with numbers like 32 and 212 for the freezing and boiling temperatures of water? For a long time, this question was essentially unanswerable, but with the publication of some old scientific correspondence the answer has become clear. Basically, the numbers arose almost accidentally. The main consideration seems always to have been to preserve comparability between earlier scales and new ones. The boiling point of water was never a calibration point for Fahrenheit, and the nonzero freezing point (I think it was 8 before he multiplied all temperatures by four) was inherited from an earlier scheme. That earlier scheme was used for recording atmospheric temperatures, and the freezing point was assigned a positive number so there would be no need to record negative temperature values. As you can see, I'm away from my references. I'll return and fix things up later.

When Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit was elected a foreign Fellow of the Royal Society, he contributed a paper on thermometers (written in Latin). The paper was a bit unclear on his points of calibration. He mentioned three points, the lowest one being defined in terms of a brine solution. It has been suggested that Fahrenheit was purposely unclear to protect the trade secrets of his instrument-making business, but this isn't really plausible as an explanation for calibration points. Instead, it seems that two of what have been regarded as his ``calibration points'' were simply given so his audience would have some idea of the range of his scale.

The meaning of Fahrenheit's name is given at the Fahrvergnügen entry. It's not especially deutlich.

This page cooly examines some of the evidence concerning the effectiveness of fluoride in preventing cavities.

Here is how General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) explained his actions to Group Captain Lionel Mandrake (Peter Sellers) in Dr. Strangelove:

I can no longer sit back and allow communist infiltration, communist indoctrination, communist subversion, and the international communist conspiracy, to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.

The problem here is that the foxtrot is dated. Try ``Fandango.''

Even on the best phones, ``eff'' sounds almost indistinguishable from ``ess.'' Most people just use ``Sam'' and ``Frank'' to distinguish these. You can try ``Foxtrot'' and ``Sierra,'' but people will just become confused, so if you're really not going to use the standard Sam and Frank, then you get more mileage from the SBF recommendations (Fandango and Succotash) than from the boring old FCC recommendations.

When I ordered my X-server from Xi Graphics, the guy who took my order actually asked me to spell my first name. I was so stunned that I just said ``Ay El Eff Arr Ee Dee.'' Sure enough, the package came addressed to Alsred. I mean, I know it's becoming an unusual name and all, but really! (When I was in graduate school and everyone was foreign, I once introduced myself to someone with ``I'm Al'' and he replied ``How do you spell that''? It's even an entry in this glossary.)

Update on Fandango and Foxtrot: maybe Foxtrot will come back. Alicia just wrote saying that she needed a new activity now that summer sailing is coming to an end, -- maybe she'll take up Swing Dancing. And the New York Times had an article on same.

Of course, Foxtrot is the name of a comic strip. I wonder if the late Charles Schulz got kickbacks from the peanut farmers for not changing his strip's name to Macadamia Nuts or something. It could have been quite a racket. Too bad he didn't get to name his own strip.

(In addition to the syndicate's address above, the peanuts site can be reached at <http://www.snoopy.com/>.)

These standard examples concern counts or events per unit of a continuous variable (typically time or distance) [and each describes an intrinsic rather than extrinsic quantity in the sense these words have in thermodynamics]. High values of these frequencies do manifest the conventional notion expressed by the term ``frequent'' in ordinary language, and carry the sense that distinguishes ``frequent'' from ``a lot'' (at one time or infrequently).

A further technical generalization is frequency as number of occurrences per sample. This preserves the conventional notion of frequency as count of events per unit of something else, but the something else is discrete, and these frequencies are given in essentially dimensionless units (like errors per bin). This usage is appropriate and more-or-less natural in some parts of biology and in most of the social sciences, and is the standard usage in statistics, but a physical scientist has to keep the difference in mind when reading statistical literature: statistical ``frequency'' can mean number (N).

In England, the FA is the senior administrative body of English soccer. There is also a Football League, which until the start of the 1992 season represented teams at all levels of professional play. I'm not sure exactly how responsibilities were, or were not, divided. The league was subordinate in principle, but represented a different set of interests. In the last years of this arrangement, there was an increasing feeling within the FA that the interests of the Football League were in conflict with those of the top teams and, therefore, those of the England team. (The FL, dominated by the larger number of lower-division teams, preferred more and weaker top teams, and more games between teams in the top and lower divisions.)

In 1958, the north and south divisions of English soccer's Third Division were joined and redivided to produce a system of four ranked divisions. In 1991, the FA decided to take the First Division out of the FL and create a special Premier League (eventually also called the Premiership) for those teams starting in the 1992-3 season. After serious contention, threats of legal action, and some compromises on detail, this plan took effect. By agreement, at the end of the 1994-5 season the Premier League was winnowed from its original 22 teams to 20 (by four relegations and two promotions). (Also starting in 1992, the earlier Second, Third, and Fourth Divisions of the FL became First, Second, and Third Divisions when the original First left to form its own league.)

In May 1996, the Nationwide Building Society replaced Endsleigh Insurance as the FL's sponsor, and the FL was frequently referred to as the Nationwide League (and less often as the Nationwide Football League). Over the Summer in 2004, to widespread cynicism (well, it's England, isn't it?), the old Divisions One, Two, and Three were renamed The Championship, League One, and League Two, respectively for the start of the '04-05 season. Coca-Cola took over sponsorship, but ``Coca-Cola League'' doesn't seem to be a very catching name.

One common way in which some thousands of the disappeared were disposed of was by dropping them (many alive, usually drugged; some with their bellies slit; a few previously dead) into the middle of the Atlantic. But the drops were apparently from naval aircraft.

As of 2001, there are almost forty 12-in. wafer fabs in the world, about two thirds of these in the Asia Pacific region -- predominantly Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea.

The band name The Beatles was chosen partly in allusion to The Crickets, the name of Buddy Holly's band, and partly in reference to beat -- whether musical or poetic (as in beatnik) or both I'm not sure. (More on this at the R.E.M. entry.)

Ringo Starr was originally named Richard Starkey. He married Barbara Bach, who was originally named Barbara Goldbach. I guess Starkey is his ``real name'' -- his kids (by first wife Maureen) use the last name Starkey.

Of course, it might not teach the truth. (Cf. experientia docet.) Also, for something interesting on the subsequent sense development of fabula, see the discussion of hablar in the Spanish entry.

Celebrating the great love of the French for American Art? Yes! And it was just a wild (I mean wild) guess! Anyway, it's the half of it.

From Paris Voice (``the magazine for English-speaking Parisians'') June 2001:

A new American institution devoted to cultural exchanges between the US and France opens its doors this month at the Espace Pierre Cardin on place de la concorde. With the death of the former American Center still on many Paris expats' minds, some people wonder if things will be different this time.''

Congress enacted the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) to control the growth and operation of the "numerous committees, boards, commissions, councils, and similar groups which have been established to advise officers and agencies in the executive branch of the Federal Government" (5 U.S.C. App. 2 § 2(a)). An "advisory committee" is defined as "any committee, board, commission, council, conference, panel, task force, or other similar group, or any subcommittee or other subgroup thereof" that is "established or utilized" by the President or an agency "in the interest of obtaining advice or recommendations for the President or one or more agencies or officers of the Federal Government" (5 U.S.C. App. 2 § 3(2)).

FACA places a number of procedural restrictions on bodies that constitute "advisory committees." Every advisory committee must file a charter (5 U.S.C. App. 2 §§ 9(c), 10(a)(2)); its meetings must be open to the public (id. § 10(a)(1)); it must keep "[d]etailed minutes" of its meetings (id. § 10(c)); and it must generally permit "[i]nterested persons . . . to attend, appear before, or file statements" with it (id. § 10(a)(3)), unless a decision is made to close the meeting (id. § 10(d)). In addition to governing how the group functions, FACA also requires an advisory committee to make publicly available "the records, reports, transcripts, minutes, appendixes, working papers, drafts, studies, agenda, or other documents which were made available to or prepared for or by [the] advisory committee" (id. § 10(b)). This obligation exists only "until the advisory committee ceases to exist" and is no longer subject to the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act.

FACA also imposes a number of requirements on federal officials regarding creation and use of advisory committees. A committee must specifically be authorized (either by statute or by the President), or be determined by an agency head to be in the public interest (id. § 9(a)); it must be "fairly balanced in terms of the points of view represented and the functions to be performed" (id. § 5(b)(2)); and precautions must be taken to assure that an advisory committee is not "inappropriately influenced by the appointing authority or by any special interest" (id. § 5(b)(3)).

FACA is generally regarded as a hindrance to agencies' efforts to obtain information from the scientific community and stakeholders. Several survey participants argued that it should be amended to specifically exclude ad hoc agency efforts to obtain information from the public, state or local authorities, and scientists. They maintained that FACA should be limited to situations where an agency seeks the opinion of an advisory committee as an authoritative, expert source, consistent with the original intent of Congress.

Just the FACS, ma'am. We'll handle the power management.

The ``Free'' does make it sound commercial, doesn't it? Maybe if they charged a hundred dollars a pop, they could turn it into a lottery and one out of every thousand applicants would get a four-year free ride.

The association between paleness and ill-health of some sort has some generality. The word fahl is derived from an OHG word falo, and the cognate English word now spelled fallow originally also meant `pale,' but pale relative to red: pale brown or reddish yellow, like withered grass. If a field is not replanted after the fruit is harvested, then it may well appear fallow in this sense the following season, hence the modern sense of fallow or ``to lie fallow.'' In the case of vegetation, perhaps a certain element of ill-health or non-vibrancy was understood. The old sense, with no imputation of ill-health, survives in the common name fallow deer for a species of deer lighter-colored than the red deer. The words fahl and fallow are cognate with the Greek poliós (`gray'; cf. polio) and Lithuanian palvas (`pale yellow'). The Latin pallidus, `pale,' definitely implied that the paleness was due to sickness or emotional stress (in contexts where such implication made sense). The English word pale is derived from this Latin word via Norman French; the English word pallid was borrowed directly from Latin in the fifteenth century. The English word pallor also comes from Norman French, unchanged in spelling or meaning from the classical Latin pallor, a noun based on the verb pallere (the same verb that the adjective pallidus was based on). There are other connections with less-common words; one worth mentioning in this entry is fahl, used by geologists as a synonym for Fahlerz, q.v..

Fahl ore is sometimes defined simply as tetrahedrite. You may think this is of little help to you, but it's not of much help to me either. For unfortunately good reason, mineral terminology is sloppy in places. A single term will be used for a particular allomorph of a single well-defined compound, and it will also be used for what one finds in reality, which is typically an approximation. For example, tetrahedrite in the narrowest sense is a copper mineral with a pyrite structure and a composition Cu₁₂Sb₄S₁₃. What one finds by digging, and what a name is needed for, is usually a mix. A fraction (up to one sixth) of the copper (Cu) sites in the crystal are occupied by iron (Fe), cobalt (Co), lead (Pb), mercury (Hg), nickel (Ni), silver (Ag), and zinc (Zn) atoms. In addition, the antimony (Sb) may be replaced by arsenic (As). The pure mineral corresponding to tetrahedrite is tennantite: Cu₁₂As₄S₁₃. The two are hard to tell apart by physical properties and appearance. In nature, deposits of tetrahedrite and tennantite are not homogeneous: different parts contain different concentrations of the various substituents, and vary in color.

In addition to the usual looseness of mineralogical terminology, the term fahl often has the burden of being used to indicate not so much a mineral but a geological situation. Specifically, fahl occurs where typically sulfidic copper minerals become exposed to the air and percolating water. They oxidize to form a mix of oxides, hydroxides, and hydroxy-carbonates (particularly azurite and malachite). The metals in these minerals are dissolved by ground water, trickle down, and recombine with sulfur to form a messy mix of minerals such as chalcolite (Cu₂S) and tetrahedrite.

The mechanism of the previous paragraph describes only one of the ways that tetrahedrite can form, but it is a mechanism of great archaeological importance. The copper minerals on the surface can be reduced by aqueous surface solutions to produce native copper. It is reasonably speculated that the association of the native metal with this ore was a critical clue led to neolithic man to invent copper smelting. The tetrahedrite below accumulates in easy-to-mine clayey deposits. (After all, pickaxes were not initially available.) Archaeologists understand Fahlerz in the sense of this specific kind of clayey copper ore.

In German class in junior high school, we were taught to say ``Viel Vergnügen beim Tanz'' (loosely, `dancing with you was a pleasure') to our partners after a turn on the floor, but we weren't taught to dance, so the phrase would probably never have been true. The morpheme fahr in the headword is from the the verb fahren, `to drive.' ``Sie fahrt'' means `she drives' and sounds like a Bostonian saying ``zee fart,'' but after a while even seventh-graders tire of this joke.

German also has a verb reiten, `to ride.' The difference between driving and riding in English is not entirely clear-cut. To ride suggests something more passive to drive. To ride is to be conveyed, probably as a passenger. There are exceptions, however, and some are useful. In particular, a man driving a horse-drawn carriage and a man riding a horse are both driving a horse in some sense of that word, but consistently using the verb ride in the one of those two instances where it is applicable allows us to indicate that the carriage-rider is not riding the horse, even though the verb we use in the case (drive) is nonspecific. Similarly in German, to ride a horse is ``ein Pferd reiten,'' while to drive a horse is ``ein Pferd fahren.'' (Of course, when the horse has two riders, one might well be a nondriver. If you want to give that horse bamboo spine, I'm not going to abet you lexicographically.) In English, perhaps by analogy with horseback riding, we use the terms ``bike riding'' and ``motorcycle riding.'' The respective German terms use fahren: ``Fahrrad fahren'' and ``Motorrad fahren.''

A disk drive is ``ein Diskettenlaufwerk.'' The verb laufen means `to run.' (Die Platte is also used for `the disk,' as part of compounds like die Magnetplatte, but das Plattenlaufwerk is even rarer than das Disklaufwerk.)

Fahrenheit is a name that was given to people from Fahrenhaupt (in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern). The place name Fahrenhaupt seems like it ought to mean `main drive.' The most famous Fahrenheit, of course, is Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit. In the middle of the seventeenth century his family moved from Königsberg (then the capital of East Prussia, now Kaliningrad in Russia) to the Polish port of Gdansk (Gdańsk in Polish). There he was born in 1686. Since his family was German, and perhaps since Gdansk was from time to time under Teutonic Knight, Prussian, and German control, German references describe him as German. I don't know if the Poles claim him. His parents died suddenly in 1701, and his guardian sent him to apprentice in Amsterdam. He made his career in the Netherlands and died in The Hague in 1736, so the Dutch consider him Dutch. It reminds me of Einstein's repeated quip about what nationalities he would be assigned, depending on whether his theories proved true or false.

I'm also reminded of Handel. Georg Friederich Händel was born in Halle (in Saxony -- a German, um, Land), the son of a barber-surgeon (that was a common career combination, back then). In 1710 he was appointed Kapellmeister to George Louis, the elector of Hanover and the future King George I of England. That year Haendel (this spelling was used too) preceded his patron to England and found favor in Queen Anne's court. His warm reception in London made him reluctant to return to Hanover; Anne's death in 1714 and the crowning of George as King of England made the return unnecessary. From 1715 his name was George Frideric Handel, and in 1726 he became a British subject. In 1741 he wrote his Messiah, probably the most famous of all oratorios, whatever those are. He also wrote something called Music for the Royal Fireworks (1759). I've never heard it, but I bet it would make a great B side to Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture. Handel died in 1759 in London. So the British have good cause to call him a ``German-born English composer.'' I believe the general unofficial view in Germany is that he was a German composer, but that England never produced any good composers of its own so they adopted him. Something similar, though to lesser degree, seems to have happened with Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847). It's surprising I haven't mentioned somewhere how much Samuel (Erewhon) Butler despised Felix Mendelssohn's music. (He considered it repetitive.)

Before you get too involved in studying the history of Protestant churches in Argentina, you should note some quantitative facts: at the beginning of the twenty-first century, 92% of the population of Argentina is counted Roman Catholic, and 2% belongs to a Protestant denomination (including some, like the Baptist and Anglican, that don't belong to FAIE) . (Also about 0.7% Jewish, see DAIA.)

Fine. Now what I want to know is, why did this word just pop into my head? Isn't it too late to be going mad?

Pronounced like French faïence (even spelled that way if you like), it takes its name from the Italian town of Faenza.

``FAIR is the national media watch group that offers well-documented criticism of media bias and censorship. FAIR seeks to invigorate the First Amendment by advocating for greater diversity in the press. FAIR scrutinizes media practices that marginalize public interest, minority and dissenting viewpoints.

Ultimately, FAIR believes that structural reform is needed to break up the dominant media conglomerates, establish independent public broadcasting and promote strong, non-profit, alternative sources of information.''

Established in 1978 as a ``national, membership-based, educational organization ... working to help the American public convince Congress that our nation's immigration laws must be reformed.''

Whether you agree or disagree, you have to admire that lovely sentiment --

An organization that sued to keep US military recruiters off US campuses, on the grounds that because of the don't-ask-don't-tell policy, granting access to military recruiters is tantamount to endorsing discrimination against homosexuals. [No law requires any institutions of higher education to grant such access, but the Solomon Amendment (not named after the third king of Judea and Israel) puts such institutions at risk of losing various sorts of government funds.]

So what we've done with the previous entry is, using special signal-processing software operating over spare Iridium satellite bandwidth, we detect the brainwaves of the closest millenarian, in order to fill in the entry and determine whether the rapture has occurred. Thus, when the definition component of the entry is -- OH MY GAWD! It's empty! This can mean only one thing! There are no millenarians with brain waves detectable on earth!

Check out the International Lyrics Server.

In 1962, Ford started selling Falcons assembled at one of its existing plants in Argentina. Starting in 1963, Falcons were manufactured in Argentina. The line was very popular there. Production peaked at 34 thousand in 1980; production finally ended in 1991. You want more details? See Todo Falcon -- Web Oficial del Ford Falcon en Argentina [`Everything Falcon']. The weird thing that strikes people about the car is that in Argentina the sheet metal was never modified very much after the mid 1960's. It's sort of like a Ford version of the Beetle or the Checker. They changed the lights, the grille, or the bumper every few years. This usually looked poorly integrated. ``Clumsily grafted'' seems to be a typical description. (The Falcon SL pictured here is a typically ghastly example.)

Something not mentioned at the official Everything-Falcon site has to do with the Argentine federal police: they must surely have been the biggest fleet purchaser of Falcons. The secret police were known for their unmarked Falcons. Here's one Australian tourist's story of his Falcon-related experiences down that line. When someone approached you from one of those unmarked Falcons, it was pretty scary, but this fellow got off with just an ID check. This reminds me of something that happened to my father when he visited Argentina in 1979. (Stop me if I've told this one before.) While there, he visited the publishing house that had continued to sell a translation dictionary of his from the late 1940's and early 1950's. I guess the Ford Falcon wasn't the only instance of Argentine business sticking with what worked. (It was an English-to-Spanish dictionary specifically targeted for technical translation, with sporadic words having large entries apparently at random wherever he felt like expanding on a topic. This seems to run in the family; it's practically spooky, but not as spooky as the rest of this story.) He was there making sure they stopped publishing his by-then already obsolete work. (Some years later, though, he did give me permission to put it up on the web if I made it extremely clear that some entries might be very much out-of-date.) He was at their storefront place on a side street, and as he talked with the owners there, traffic along the street seemed to peter out. It did peter out. Then some Falcons pulled up from both ends of the street and stopped, surrounding a doorway across the street. Soon there was a lot of noise -- of shouts, running, and guns firing. One man ran out the front door and had a chest-sized hole blown through his chest with what looked like a pistol-handled shotgun.

I remember once in the 1990's I attended an SPIE conference in Central Jersey (that's short for central New Jersey, okay?) and someone commented that he needed a US passport. I joked that I had one on me, and he commented that that was a very European habit (to carry a passport in my own country). Someone on the Classics list reported that during the 2004 elections, her precinct at first refused to accept her US passport as a valid ID. It makes sense to me: no American would ever use a passport as ID -- it's just for international travel. So when you're visiting Argentina, like my father, you should always carry your US passport.

So back to our story on a side street in Buenos Aires. After the firing was over, someone came into the shop and asked my father and the shop owners to show their ID's. One of the owners reached a little too quickly into his back pocket, and the government gentleman raised his gun. The editor fellow continued pulling out his wallet, but with a slower, if not exactly relaxed, motion (rate of speed, I think it's called). This glossary has another entry about presenting Argentine ID.

You probably think this is one of those joke entries, like the (somewhat lame, I admit) positive buoyancy entry, where I start out along the road of real events but then derail imaginatively. Nope. I didn't make anything up, though similar events were common enough that I could have.

The announced emphasis of Operation FALCON was on ``gang related crimes, homicides, crimes involving use of a weapon, crimes against children and the elderly, crimes involving sexual assaults, organized crime and drug related fugitives, and other crimes of violence.'' The arrested included 4,291 ``major narcotics violation suspects,'' but there were only 210 drug seizures during the operation. The latter included 30 kg cocaine, 190 g heroin, 204 kg marijuana, and 39 kg ``other drugs'' (i.e., at most 330 g per seizure); 243 weapons were also seized. Arrested were 1818 burglary and 1727 assault suspects, and 638 armed robbery, 553 sexual assault, 483 weapons violation, 203 stolen vehicle, and 162 murder suspects. They included 154 ``documented gang members.'' Cash in the amount of $373,000 was seized -- $36 and change per arrestee. It's not clear to me under what authority this cash was seized.

The number of outstanding warrants may seem surprising. If so, consider three facts: First, as is well-known, state and local law-enforcement agencies make a certain calculation in deciding how strenuously to pursue fugitives -- resources are always limited. Second, in the case of fugitives wanted on bench warrants (i.e., bail jumpers and other no-shows), police may delay pursuit in the not-entirely-unreasonable expectation that the fugitive will turn up. Finally, cases grow cold, other cases come up, and in the meantime fugitives return to associations and places they knew would be investigated in any initial search. A systematic review of cold cases can net a share of those, and many individual cases reported for this operation seemed to fall into that category.

Historically, it is also the case that coordination among different agencies has sometimes been poor, occasionally obstructed by professional rivalries. Also, cases tend to go cold when the suspect appears to have left a local jurisdiction. It seems the USMS usually does a bit more than half of its work apprehending federal fugitives. During FY 2004, at least, it cleared 39,000 federal felony warrants, while ``U.S. Marshals-led fugitive task forces ... clear[ed] 37,900 state and local felony warrants.'' By contrast, in Operation FALCON, eight of nine arrests were on state or local warrants.

On the matter of jurisdictional conflicts and poor coordination, I remember reading in 1980 or so about the relevant case of a serial murderer back in the 70's who turned out to have worked for a police force and who had thus been familiar with this problem. He deliberately left remains and other clues in multiple jurisdictions in an effort (which must be judged a partial success) to thwart investigations. I can't track this down, so I'm probably misremembering some details. A recent case in which apprehension of the killer is claimed to have been delayed by interagency rivalries (RCMP vs. local cops, in this case) is that of a Vancouver serial killer, allegedly Robert Pickton, a pig farmer arrested in 2002. On the other hand, the disappearances began in 1983, and the RCMP was apparently not involved until 2001.

In the first example, the second A of NASA is expanded administration, but the SBF does not regard this as a pleonasm. The reason is that there are two different entities legitimately called ``administrations.'' NASA as a whole is an agency but it is named synecdochically after its management, as an ``administration.'' That part of NASA is the NASA administration (distinct from higher levels within the executive branch of government, which might engage in administration of NASA's administration, or just plain administration administration). If someone were to refer to NASA redundantly as the NASA agency or (more equivocally) as the NASA administration, then the latter term would be an AAP pleonasm, and both would be perverse.

Another false pleonasm is ``a US state.'' Whaddaya expect me to say, ``a United state''?

Explicit examples of false pleonasm are rare because they are mostly regarded as poor style, because they are easily avoided, and because they are obvious. Thus, the given example (history history) can be converted into a more complex noun phrase in which a preposition establishes a distinction between the instances of the repeated word (history of history) or can be replaced by another, possibly not-quite-synonymous term (historiography). The language provides other alternatives that do not rely on a previous coinage, like metahistory or higher-level administration.

Creative false pleonasm, in which a single word appears thrice or more, or which is otherwise novel or amusing, is generally regarded as good style wherever other forms of punning are (vide postmodern English). Sealed acronyms can be problematic, particularly if there is uncertainty regarding the status (as sealed or not) of the acronym. Recursive acronyms, or XARA's, necessarily have a pleonastic form. I don't know if that makes them false pleonasms, but I do know this: I'd rather have pleonasm than a neoplasm.

Another related common term in Spanish is falso cognado. The Spanish Wikipedia page for falso amigo warns against confusing falsos amigos with falsos cognados. I can't but agree: a ``false cognate'' or falso cognado ought to be a word that appears to be a cognate but isn't -- regardless of its meaning (which determines whether or not it is a false friend). It is true that false friends are most often cognates, especially among European languages. Such cognates generally mislead not by appearing to be cognates when they are not, but by suggesting an incorrect meaning. In any case, usage may have demolished the distinction. The reference shelf of relevant books that is nearest to hand right now contains three dictionaries of Spanish-English false friends, and two of them bear athetizable titles:

1. Marcial Prado: NTC's Dictionary of Spanish False Cognates (Chicago: NTC Publishing Group, 1993).
2. Bernard H. Hamel: Comprehensive Bilingual Dictionary of Spanish False Cognates / Gran Diccionario de Términos Equívocos del Inglés (Los Angeles: Bilingual Book Press, 1/e 1998).
3. Marcial Prado: Diccionario de Falsos Amigos Inglés-Español (Madrid: Editorial Gredos, 2001).

Of course, if you want cheaper, there's Wikipedia. It is interesting that the corresponding Galician (northwest Iberian) Wikipedia page indicates in passing that falso cognado is the same thing as a falso amigo. If both Spanish and Galician pages are to be believed, then falso cognado in Spanish is a falso cognado in Galician of falso cognado in Galician.

An excellent source for information on German surnames is Familiennamen: Herkunft und Bedeutung von 20 000 Nachnamen [`Surnames: Origin and Meaning of 20,000 Last Names'], Rosa Kohlheim and Volker Kohlheim (Duden, 2000). A cool thing about this book is that it lists ``bekannte Namensträger'' (`famous bearers of the name') and is illustrated with pictures of some. It also has charts and maps of the German Sprachraum, where one can see correlations of the relative prevalences of different names with dialect boundaries. For given names there's the five-volume Historisches Deutsches Vornamenbuch, Wilfried Seibicke (de Gruyter, 1996). Hanks and Hodges do the same for names encountered in the English-speaking world (including names from throughout Europe and the world, with varying degrees of coverage as you might expect). See also Reaney and Wilson.

Hanks and Hodges had a special consultant for Jewish names, and the Kohlheims' book has good coverage of Ashkenazi Jewish names, but there's a very complete work that is more comprehensive even for Jewish names of German or Yiddish origin: Etymologisches Lexikon der jüdischen Familiennamen, Eva H. Guggenheimer and Heinrich W. Guggenheimer (K. G. Saur, 1996). This is written in German with a Roman font, as you'd expect, but it also provides the spellings of principal forms, as appropriate, of the names in Amharic, Arabic (and Farsi), Cyrillic, Georgian, and Hebrew alphabets (used for Yiddish), and with special characters in the Roman alphabets for Czech, Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, and Turkish. A much less complete collection forms the second half of A Dictionary of Jewish Names and their History, Benzion C. Kaganoff (Schocken Books, 1977). The first half is an interesting history.

The singular form is used in the sense of `catch, haul, take.' For example, ``die Fischer brachten ihren Fang ein'' can be rendered as `the fishermen brought in their haul.' It's also used like `the hunt' in English: ``auf Fang ausgehen'' is `to go hunting' or more literally `to go out on the hunt.' Similarly, ``zum Fang auslaufen,'' ``zum Fang ausfahren,'' and ``aus Fang fahren'' mean `to go fishing.' It may help to understand that ausgehen just means `to go out,' while auslaufen means `to go out on a watercraft' (less awkwardly: `to put out to sea' vel sim.). The verb ausfahren is a bit more general, meaning `to set out riding or driving' in a precise translation. Since going out to capture or kill land animals can be done on foot (I mean, let's be sporting about this), ausfahren tends to imply fishing. If you want to be explicit, you could just use ``zum Fischfang ausfahren.'' Of course, the laconic expression is ``fischen gehen'' (`to go fishing').

For the anatomical parts so called, the plural (Fänge) is more common. The claws (usually Klauen) of a bird (Vogel) such as a hawk (Habicht) can be called Fänge, and more figuratively, ``in seinen Fängen halten'' means `hold in one's clutches.' Fang is also used for sharp, predatory dentition, though tusks -- particularly those of a boar (Eber) -- also count as Fänge. You can remove ambiguity with die Fangzähne (`the fang-teeth').

Tush is a domesticated pronunciation of the Yiddish slang tuchis. (The ``ch'' is like that in Bach, although it might be more palatalized. When I used to hear this word I wasn't paying attention to the difference between /x/ and /ç/.) A word less widely adopted in English is the rhyming huchis, one of the words for `head.' The rhyme would often occur in discussion of the two ways of thinking (i.e., with huchis or with tuchis).

Fanny (now more often spelled Fannie, I think -- perhaps to make a distinction) was originally, and still is, a nickname for Frances. It seems like a pretty radical abbreviation, losing three consonants from sundry parts of the original, but it doesn't beat Peg for Margaret. In France it has been a nickname for Françoise, I think. My entire basis for this belief is the established fact that Fanny is a nickname for Frances in English, and the information that Claude Bernard, the French physiologist, married one ``Françoise Marie (Fanny) Martin'' in 1845.

The earliest famous Fanny that I can think of was Frances Burney (1752-1840), the author of Evelina (1778) and other novels.

A well-known fictional Fanny is Fanny Price, the heroine of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park (1814), who has the same names as her mother. Their legal name is Frances Price. Almost, so it might seem, to compensate, they have a sister and aunt who is never given a first name. She is first described as ``Miss Ward'' (the elder Frances Price was neé Ward), and after her marriage as Mrs. Norris. Mrs. Norris is not a sympathetic character. I think that in all of Jane Austen's work, there is only one use of ``who'' where only ``whom'' would have been acceptable, and it is put in the mouth of Mrs. Norris. (Mrs. Norris is also the name of a cat in the Harry Potter series.) It is reasonably conjectured [for example, by Maggie Lane, in her Jane Austen and Names (Blaise Books, 2002)] that the original Mrs. Norris was an Elizabeth, since her goddaughter is called Betsey.

This godchild business highlights the fact that at the time, nicknames were not so readily recorded as given names. So long as Fanny or Betsey was recognized as a diminutive form of Frances or Elizabeth, one could be reasonably confident that someone called by the former had been assigned the corresponding latter at birth. That standard has slipped.

An early apparent instance of this slippage seems to be the case of the actress Fanny Ardant, who was given the name ``Fanny Marguerite Judith Ardant'' at birth (according to IMDb). She was born to French parents in France in 1949. I suppose the naming was inspired by a very popular French movie trilogy of the 1930's, sometimes known as the Fanny series. The three movies were Marius (released in France in 1931), Fanny (1932), and César (1936), named after three main characters (a young man, his lover -- who discovers she is pregnant shortly after he begins a five-year maritime stint -- and his father). You mightn't think that would make Fanny a very attractive name, but apparently Fanny was a very sympathetic character. There were a number of stage and film remakes. (Another name whose popularity is surprising is Cassandra.)

This sort of stuff tends to be forgotten. My mother was given the middle name Beatrice at birth, and it wasn't until I was in my forties that I happened to learn that her father had been a great admirer of Dante.

In BJT logics, the constraint is typically that the current drive on the output stage can become insufficient for the input current draw. I.e., the output voltage shifts. Roughly speaking:

fan-in × input current × output impedance = noise margin.

An exception is I²L, in which it is useful to define current noise margins and related current quantities analogous to the usual (voltage) noise margins and related voltages.

In MOSFET logics, inputs are very-high-impedance gates, and DC fan-out is practically unlimited. However, parasitic capacitances of gates increase RC delays, so maximum fan-out is determined by maximum allowed fall and rise times.

Fil has collected a bunch of Electronics-related FAQ's in one spot, in HTML format.

There's actually an FAQ about FAQ.

The question of how to translate FAQ (in the collection sense) into French is a subtle one. One general approach is to translate the underlying expansion; this yields something like questions fréquemment posées, which is obviously unacceptable because it is too similar to the English. The solution has been to supply the English acronym with the French expansion foire aux questions. Normally, of course, a completely different and unrecognizable acronym would be required, but an identical acronym is acceptable in this case because the French expansion, meaning something like `question fair,' would be incomprehensible without it.

n.
1. A litter of pigs (not pig litter, unless that's how you feel about it, alright already let me finish the glossary entry!).

   v.

2. To give birth to a pig litter. (Similarly, to litter means to give birth to a litter, not necessarily of cats. Some places it does, anyway.)

The lyrics of Prumpufólkið were written by the comedian Jón Gnarr, who also performed the dozen or so sound effects on that song and wrote the lyrics to ``Óli HundaÓli,'' the fifth of thirteen songs on the album. In 2010 he was elected mayor of Reykjavík. This reminds me of a friend of mine who is also of Scandinavian descent: Moe (that's his actual nickname). Moe attended a high school in South Dakota that was so tiny that everyone had to fill multiple roles. Moe, for example, was both a nerd (computer programming) and a jock (basketball), and probably a bunch of things I never heard about. But Gnarr's is a different case, because his campaign for mayor was an extension of his comedian shtick, and was taken seriously by no one except, apparently, a plurality of Reykjavík voters.

Fanciful etymology: Boston Tea Party.

A friend of mine did a study of interpretation work at a Tokyo hospital. Some local nonprofits train volunteers for this (teaching them some Japanese medical vocabulary, at least) and supply the hospital with mostly native speakers of some of the more necessary languages, including English, Chinese, Korean, Spanish, Portuguese, and Tagalog. One thing she didn't mention in the papers she wrote on the subject is the following: she sat in on some of the separate classes for groups training in various languages, and the Filipinos were clearly the ones who were having the most fun.

There's a FASO (webpage here) at the University of Notre Dame. Their major annual event is Fiestang Filipino. Fiestang I was held on April 29, 1995, and Fiestang II was December 2 the same calendar year, but since then it's been mostly the last week of February. In 2008 (Fiestang XIV, on February 23), it won the university's MSPS Culture Show of the Year award.

She said, ``fasta, fasta, the lights are turnin' red.'' -- Life in the fast lane -- sure to make you lose your mine.

Heretical precepts:

1. The entire road is a parking lot.
2. The rearview mirror is for (a) backing out of parking spaces, (b) hanging fuzzy dice and pine scent fresheners, (c) personal grooming.
3. Blinkers should be used because the law requires it. They must be turned on at some point before the end of a turn.
4. Most of driving is pressing on the accelerator when the lane ahead is empty, and on the brake otherwise. (When in doubt, depress both.)
5. The driver with blinders has the right of way.

It is that which men in former times had to bear upon their backs.

It is that which has caused nations to build byways from City to City upon which carts and coaches pass, and alongside which inns have come to be built to stave off Hunger, Thirst and Weariness.

[According to The Profit (1973), by Kehlog Albran (1933-1927).]

Oh, I'm sorry, that's freight... but it's okay, you needed to know that too.

In book 17 of the Odyssey, as Odysseus finally arrives at his home disguised as a beggar, he explains to Eumaeus the swineherd (translation of A.T. Murray):

``... a ravening belly may no man hide, an accursed plague that brings many evils upon men. Because of it are the benched ships also made ready, that bear evil to foemen over the unresting sea.''

Shortly afterwards, Odysseus's dog dies. As Murray puts it --

``the fate of black death seized him straightway.''

The term oil is rather ambiguous, as it may refer to mineral oil or to petroleum. Fat is a more precise term that doesn't usually exclude triglyceride oils.

Need to cut down on your fat consumption? Here's a true fact and a health tip: Sugars are carbohydrates, not fats. For more worthless dieting tips, see calorie and lose weight entries.

Faux amis are like approximate homonyms. As in the case of English-language homonyms, there are two large subclasses of homonyms: homographs, which are written similarly, and homophones, which sound similar. These two subclasses overlap, and in languages with a one-to-one correspondence between pronunciation and spelling, the two coincide perfectly. (I am aware of no European language with such a perfect correspondence.) Different languages, of course, have different sound-value correspondences, so visual and aural classes of faux ami overlap imperfectly. An example of a visual (homograph) faux ami is once, meaning `eleven' in Spanish. In the episode of ER that aired October 25, 2001, a Spanish-speaking patient dies because her prescription drug bottle was labeled in English, ``once'' a day. She wouldn't have made this mistake if it had been labeled in the original Latin -- q.d. (For more on once in Spanish, see the entries for las once and las onces.)

Examples between English and German include knave/Knabe. This is a typical instance in which a word's negative connotation has become the essence of its denotation. The German modal verb wollen, with will as first- and third-person singular conjugations in the present, has the meaning English will had not too long ago: `want to.' (The modal for constructing future tense is werden.) Another example, for those who recognize it, is starve/sterben (as explained at the linked entry). If one is alive to the sound shifts that have affected English and German since their source languages diverged from a common Germanic root, one notices many more examples. E.g., German Tier, meaning `animal,' is the cognate of English deer; German dick (like Dutch dik) is an adjective meaning obese (i.e., thick); dieb and tief (both pronounced with long-ee vowel sound) mean `thief' and `deep,' in that order.

Some examples between English and Spanish:

• assist/asistir (the Spanish word means `attend,' mostly in the sense of being present -- i.e., attending a meeting, not a surgical ward; to assist or help is ayudar)
• carton/cartón (cartón is normally the material a carton is made of; discussion at the CTN entry)
• competence/competencia (`competition'; there are many synonyms for competence in Spanish, as in English, but competencia is not one of them)
• embarrassed/embarazada (`pregnant,' as discussed toward the end of the TP; shame, taken from the Latin root, is vergüenza, and embarrassed or ashamed is avergonzad{o|a})
• man/mano (`hand,' see discussion at mano a mano)

For an example involving a number of languages, see the libraries entry. Here are some other scattered examples involving at least two languages other than English:

Language	word	English meaning
Swedish	tryck	push (as a door)
Norwegian (Bok Maal)	trekk	pull (as a door)

Language	word	English meaning	true friend
German	Öl	oil	olya in Swedish (vide infra)
Swedish	öl	beer	Bier in German

For a more thorough discussion of the above, see the this oe entry.

Language	word	English meaning
German	Gift	poison
Swedish	gift	bride
English	gift	something given (see gift entry)

Language	word	English meaning
Spanish	olla	pot
Swedish	olya	oil

Language	word	approximate English meaning
Spanish	algún	some
	cualquier	any
French	aucun	none*
	quelques	some, any

^* There are a few difficulties in translating these words into English. The first is that negation is coordinated or additive in French and Spanish, somewhat as in slang English. Thus, Standard English I have no problem is normally translated No tengo ningún problema in Spanish, corresponding to [I] don't have no problem. Typical parallel expressions in French use aucun in place of ningún. This corresponds to an older usage in Spanish, now markedly formal, that uses the adjective alguno in place of ninguno.

[Note: algún is the prepositive version of the adjective alguno. In Spanish as in French, adjectives other than quantifiers usually follow the substantives they modify -- placement before the substantive often marks poetic diction just as placement after the substantive marks poetic diction in English. Some adjectives appear commonly both before and after the substantive, and a few of these have different postpositive and prepositive forms. For example, the (etymologically related) adjectives that have masculine forms uno (`one'), alguno, and ninguno following a substantive have the forms un, algún, and algún before it (the feminine forms are unchanged). The adjective grande (postpositive form, both genders) becomes gran before a substantive.]

For glossary visitors not fluent in English, I will point out something well known (usually unreflectively) by native speakers. English takes advantage of the absence of coordination: negation in Standard English is somewhat multiplicative. For example, ``I don't want no feedback.'' For the purposes of elementary education, this is called a ``double negative'' and marked incorrect. Between even moderately sophisticated speakers, this is simply a kind of litotes: speaker is saying, generally, that he wants some feedback. If the stress is placed as indicated above, on the word no, then typically it might mean ``I do want less feedback, but not none at all.'' (If this ``not none'' bothers you, think ``not zero.'') Some emphatic intonation is usually applied to the sentence in order to make clear that the double negative is not a careless ungrammatical slip.

Generally speaking, English syntax uses the position of negation to make distinctions that other languages may make in different ways. In particular, negation of a modal verb in a periphrastic tense is not generally the same as negation of the verb. An example follows.

Did I ever tell you about the time I managed to not quite electrocute myself? (I was not suicidal. It would be wrong to say that ``I did not quite manage to electrocute myself.'') I may have mentioned it somewhere else around here -- there's a hint of it at the M (for Metal) entry. What happened was, I was operating an induction furnace, which melts ferromagnetic metal by surrounding a crucible with an electromagnetic coil and having the metal to be melted function as the core of a heavy-duty electromagnet. (The area enclosed by the hysteresis loop on the M-H diagram is the energy absorbed per cycle, up to a constant factor.) I doubt that the Filipino lab technician explained any of this to me.

To avoid oxidation, the crucible and the mold which received the molten metal from the crucible were enclosed in a vacuum chamber (which was evacuated cold and refilled with nitrogen before heating). The crucible was mounted on a horizontal axle, and this axle extended out of the chamber through a gasketed bearing, to a handle that allowed the operator (yours truly) to pivot the crucible for various purposes. On the handle there were a couple of thick bolts that hold the handle in place against the axle. Believing myself to be savvy and generally in-the-know about bolt-based mechanical systems, I never paid much attention to these exposed bolts on the handle, and I never touched them. Then one day my hand happened to brush one of them.

As I was getting up off the floor, at my new location a few feet away from the furnace, the lab tech ran up and admonished me in an alarmed voice --

A second difficulty in translating, say, French quelques into English has to do with the any/some distinction. The distinction between the English words any and some corresponds reasonably closely to that between Spanish algún and cualquier. German and French, although they have apparent cognates, do not make the distinction.

That annoying shriek that announces a fax - the fax calling tone defined by CCITT T.30, is only 1100 Hz.

There are a variety of different kinds of Monte Carlo simulation, but they all have in common the approach of following the behavior of only the most interesting electrons

Currently, fuel cell technology is competitive only for certain niche applications such as space satellite power systems. The fuel-cell type used by NASA, and still the only one that is ``space qualified,'' uses potassium hydroxide electrolyte. More details about it and NASA's experiences with it are at the AFC entry. A number of new FC systems are being researched or developed. These are distinguished and designated primarily by their electrolyte material, and the main ones are Phosphoric Acid Fuel Cell (PAFC), Molten Carbonate FC (MCFC), Solid Oxide FC (SOFC) and Proton-Exchange Membrane FC (PEMFC). See also DMFC.

As of 1997, the basic problem was that costs were at US$3000/KW and up, whereas fossil fuel capital costs were about 800-1000 US$/KW. The gap is being closed from both ends.

The first fuel cell was demonstrated by William Grove in 1839, who used four large cells in series to generate the voltage to split water in a separate smaller cell.

A single hydrogen fuel cell has a voltage of about 0.7 V. That is, its open-circuit voltage is 0.7 V. As you draw current the voltage decreases. If it didn't you could just use a very small resistance to draw very high current and get arbitrarily high power. Let's start a research program to do just that! Maybe not. The first law of thermodynamics is such a party-pooper.

I had forgotten about the FCAT when I happened to see some thick workbooks for sale cheap. Their titles were Show What You Know^® on the <n>th Grade FCAT. The ones I saw had <n> values of 4 and 5. It saddened me; Mr. Thomas Gradgrind would have been pleased. The workbooks came in two versions: ``Student Workbook'' (pink, with a place for the child to scrawl a name on the front) and ``Parent/Teacher Edition'' (blue).

I suppose the FCAT is a ``comprehensive assessment'' of how well the children have been prepped for the test, so it's about as uncomprehensive as ``comprehensive'' gets. Perhaps there is some inadvertent spillover of non-test-oriented learning that affects the FCAT grade. I can't remember the (clever punning) title right now, but I once read a book about a year in the life of an elementary school elsewhere (Maryland, if memory serves) that was under its own state's testing gun. It was in a poor neighborhood, and it regularly received extra state funding to improve its performance. Teachers and principal were hostages to the often chaotic home lives of their students, and lived in terror of poor test results.

			 ½
			2 /6 ,

Every physicist knows, and every mathematician believes, that Face-Centered Cubic has the highest possible packing density.

In many higher-dimensional Euclidean spaces, it is unknown even whether the closest hypersphere packings have crystal (i.e. translation) symmetry.

The fact that FCC and HCP have identical, maximal packing densities has, as one of its most immediate reflections in crystallography, the fact that all noble gases (the group VIII-A elements) all have HCP or FCC structure. The reason is that with their closed atomic shells, noble gas atoms have weak interatomic forces and maintain their spherical symmetry more accurately in the presence of external perturbations. The interatomic forces among noble atoms therefore closely approximate the hard-sphere model. Helium (He) freezes in HCP (under pressure only; at atmospheric pressure, it is fluid -- superfluid, actually -- down to T = 0K). The other noble elements freeze in FCC. The number and distance of nearest neighbors is the same in FCC and HCP, so the difference in energy between the two structures, determining which is the equilibrium lattice, is dominated by van der Waals interaction between next-nearest neighbors.

FCC is a Bravais lattice, and its Wigner-Seitz cell is a rhombic dodecahedron. Its reciprocal lattice is Body-Centered Cubic (BCC).

It is convenient to regard the FCC lattice as a simple-cubic (SC) lattice with basis. For that picture, consider an SC lattice with points on hax + jay + kaz (a is the cubic lattice spacing; h, j, k are integers; x, y, and z are orthogonal unit vectors, so that ax, ay, and az are a set of primitive lattice vectors for the SC lattice). An FCC lattice can be generated using a basis of 0, (y + z)/2 , (x + z)/2 , and (x + y)/2 .

In French it's the PACC (formerly the FPACC). Don't worry -- it's national but nongovernmental, so everything is in English.

In the name transition from FCS to FNS, there doesn't appear to have been a time when the official name could be abbreviated FCNS. However, either out of confusion or a desire to avoid confusion, FCNS has also been used.

Look, if you mean freon, you can just say Freone. In any case, it's not the hydrogen that people worry about. It's not even the fluorine people are worried about, but mostly the chlorine -- on account of the ozone layer.

Information bits are stored on floppy disks, or diskettes, as orientation patterns of magnetic domains. X-rays are not particularly likely to flip these orientations. The concern about airport X-ray scanners has to do with the equipment used to generate the X-rays. This is high-power and therefore high-current, and high currents generate high magnetic fields, which certainly might wipe or corrupt diskettes. FWIW, I've put my portable, my quasiportable (Macintosh SE/30; hey -- it's got a handle on it!), and my diskettes through plenty of X-ray machines with no discernible problems. (Wow, historical entry.) Of course, YMMV.

The words state and district above translate the German Land and Bezirk. I guess if you read that last word in English it sounds like a common pronunciation of berserk, so right there I've filled my humor quota for the day. Correctly pronounced in German, it sounds something like ``beh TSEERK'' in English, which doesn't look a whole lot saner. Bezirke are like counties, so their capitals are like county seats. The proper term is Kreisstadt, and it doesn't gain much in translation.

The city and surrounding district take their name from die Fulda, a 218-km river, half of that navigable, whose waters join those of the Werra to form the Weser. The origin of the name Fulda is uncertain.

FDA-approved synthetic food colors have FD&C numbers.

The FSLIC was available to insure deposits at S&L's and savings banks from 1934 until 1989. As explained at the RTC entry, since 1989 the FDIC has also been the federal deposit-insurance corporation for these other banks.

For a long time the maximum amount insured per account per bank was $100,000. At the time of the market meltdown of September 2008, some kinds of accounts had their maximum insured amounts temporarily raised to $250,000, and that increase was eventually made permanent. The notion of ``per account'' is slightly tricky. For example, if a person has two essentially equivalent individual accounts at one bank, then as far as the FDIC is concerned that's one account. On the other hand, if the individual has one account that is P.O.D. to some particular person, and another that is not, then those may each be separately insured up to the maximum. But don't take my word! Ask your bank; everything depends on details of control of the assets.

The accounts referred to above are ordinary savings and checking accounts. Money-market accounts and certificates of deposit, at least, may be subject to different rules. Also, the requirement that accounts be federally insured, while now fairly uniform for ordinary accounts, may not extend to higher-yield accounts. At least in Indiana, I had money in a privately-insured money-market account as recently as 2008. This was through a credit union, which was essentially acting as an intermediary for a self-insured outside institution. I don't know if Indiana or some other state allows similar arrangements through other kinds of financial institutions, but I'm just saying: I don't know that they don't. Generally speaking, if you want to take a risk, there are plenty of ways to do it. And if you don't want to take any risk, then there may be no way to do that, unless you count burning your money and having nothing left to lose.

The German flag consists of three horizontal bands: black, red, and yellow (schwarz, rot, und gelb) from top to bottom. In the color shorthand for political parties, the Christian Democratic parties (CDU and CSU) are ``black,'' the socialist parties (primarily the SPD) are ``red,'' and the FDP is `yellow.' The yellows are a centrist party in the qualitative sense of being a moderate party that in some respects occupies the political middle ground between the reds and blacks. [I guess if you insist on seeing latent racial thinking everywhere, then you will also be pleased to recall that it was Kaiser Wilhelm II who coined the term ``yellow peril'' (gelbe Gefahr, discussed at the Morgenlande entry).]

An SPD-FDP coalition is known as a red-yellow coalition. A coalition of the (CDU/CSU) with the FDP is called a black-yellow coalition. In the elections of 2005 left parliamentary seats more broadly distributed than ever before, so no two-party coalition other than a grand coalition could make a majority. One of the possibilities considered was a black-yellow-green Jamaika-Koalition, named after the colors of the Jamaican flag.

The FDP was for a period in a coalition government with the SDP, but after sixteen years as junior partner of the CDU/CSU, with the passing of the sixties generation of Nationalliberale, and with the rise of the Greens as a natural coalition partner of the socialists, it has clearly become a party of the right -- a ``liberal'' party in the current sense of that term in Europe, favoring economic liberalization and reduced government in general. It has adopted as mottoes ``So viel Staat wie nötig, so wenig Staat wie möglich'' (`as much state [government] as necessary; as little state as possible') and ``Schaffung und Wahrung der Freiheit des Einzelnen'' (`creation and preservation of the freedom of the individual').

With 8.8% of the vote in the 1998 general elections, they were allocated 44 seats (out of 669).

See also the entry on dog food.

In fact, when I made up a list, it quickly became unwieldy, so I've decided only to add items for which I have either written something useful or found a good link (mostly, as of 1997.12.21, from Eric's Treasure Trove of Scientific Biography).

• Plato (especially the dialogue where Socrates maneuvers a slave boy to prove the Pythagorean theorem, the Timaeus and its influence on Kepler)
• Parmenides, mostly in connection with Zeno and Democritus. There's a local entry.
• Democritus, both on account of his atomic hypothesis and of Karl Marx's doctoral dissertation on his philosophy.
• Zeno, and other ancient Greeks who had problems with time-evolution concepts.
• Aristotle, how his Poetics is really about drama, how his ``man is a political animal'' is a poor translation (``social animal'' is better), his tusk conjecture, his other biological work, especially the conclusion that eels come from horse hairs that fall into the water, the short-lived influence of his Lyceum on scientific approach to problems, Grosseteste and Francis Bacon and embezzlement and the Tower of London, his `apocryphal' works, the demonstration that the square root of two is irrational, the relationship of Plato and Aristotle to the bean eaters, the octave, Aristotle's theory of potential, relationship to Plato's forms, etc.
• Hippocrates, and how much of his work can really be attributed to him; what is the Hippocratic oath really, isn't it Maimonides's?
• Galen, his cure for gout (swallow gold), Paracelsus's ridicule of it, the likelihood that it was not entirely ineffective.
• Philippus Aureolus Paracelsus (1493-1541) [Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim] and the etymology of gas, book-burning.
• Translation, multilingualism, polyglossia, logorrhea, thinking and dreaming verbally or not, PET brain scans, former Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau and his ex-wife Margaret.
• llamas.
• Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Euler, Joe LaGrange, Napoleon, Descartes.
• Decline and Fall of the University.
• The New York Times science reporting has a personality fetish.

The FE used to be called the Engineer-In-Training (EIT) exam. People who successfully pass the test may be called engineers-in-training or engineering interns, but use of their given names is probably preferable. For surveyors, the NCEES administers a different exam called the Fundamentals of Land Surveying (FLS) exam.

The FE and FLS exams are preliminary to the taking of the Professional Engineering (PE) and Professional Land Surveying (PLS) exams, respectively.

A Mid-Iron is what a two iron (golf club) used to be called.

There's a TV commercial running these days (May 2006, mindestens) that plays off the stereotypes associated with fear of commitment. It's for Mitchum antiperspirant, which sells an urbanized Marlboro-man image for just the price of a stick. The commercial begins with a flattering portrait of you the customer, which includes this: ``Your only real fear is commitment.''

I saw an episode of a prime-time soap in 2003 or so -- I think it was Sex and the City. One of the regular-cast characters encounters an old high-school flame who looks a lot like David Duchovny (this isn't part of the story; it's part of the guest cast). They rekindle their relationship. He doesn't seem to have too great a fear of commitment. After sex and a few dates, he reveals to her that -- you know, I can just walk away from this entry whenever I want. I'd kick the f______ dust off my shoes and never look back. I mean, is it about me, or is it about you? Or is it really about ``fear of commitment,'' the head term?

Alright, let's try to patch this up. The Duchovny character turns out to be sort of part-time institutionalized. He usually spends his nights in bedlam. If you remember, that's not a kind of bed. By now one's probably not allowed to call it that or an insane asylum or even a mental-health facility. Let's call it a happiness center. All the same, I sure as hell wouldn't want to be committed there.

Really! I'm really, really sorry! It just sounded cool! I didn't know it would have offensive implications. Oh I'm really, really--wait a second. I'm not sorry. I've just developed a Social Theory of Masculinist Ethics, and according to that, it's alright. Everything is relative, you know, except Uncle Joe.

That's enough for today. Tomorrow: Monday.

``Note that presently campaigns for the Senate file their reports with the Secretary of the Senate -- not with the FEC -- so these reports are not available [there]. Reports of the National Party Senatorial Campaign Committees are, however, included in the system. (Microfilm copies of Senate reports are on file at the Commission offices in Washington, and candidates must also file copies with their state elections office.)''

I should say something more about the limitations of federalism, beyond what you might gather from the entry on the principle of subsidiarity. I had a particular something more in mind when I started this entry but, distraught at Amanda's continuing difficulties with the legal system and her oily complexion, I was unable to finish and have now forgotten what I was going to add. You can help me out by completing this paragraph:

But really, federalism is all about limitations. Just this year, for example, ...

Hurry! Hurry to the website!

Among C. Northcote Parkinson's many great contributions to bureaucracy science were his preliminary investigations of the ``Law of Triviality. Briefly stated, it means that the time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum involved.'' [Quote is from Parkinson's Law (1957), available online from a Russian site, but perhaps only until the copyright holder finds out.] The standard example given of a low-cost/long-discussion item is coffee -- something everyone knows something they think worth prolonging a meeting to say. Here's something I circled on page D3 of the New York Times, SportsMonday, August 30, 1999. This continued the page D1 lead story about a secret agreement between the NFL and the NFL players' union under which a number of players who tested positive for illegal drugs went unpunished. (Unpunished by the league, of course. No one would think of applying the ordinary laws that put mere nonprofessional athletes in jail. It turns out that being a professional athlete does not constitute ``probable cause'' to test for drug use or search for evidence of possession, so an agreement on drug testing can be reached between league and union without any inconvenient involvement of the government, which anyway is too busy waging its war on drugs to get involved.)

Mark Collins, a former Giants cornerback, had been a player representative for 12 years and, though then recently retired as a player, remained a member of the union's executive committee. He had said in an earlier interview that there was usually a lot of bickering at meetings, and that players were known to argue about whether to use Federal Express or the United Parcel Service to mail documents. ``We get a lot done,'' he claimed, ``but things get pretty intense.''

An event this morning inspired me to haiku. I've entitled it ``New Computer.''

If you read too many acronyms, soon you read too much into acronyms. Same problem with the next one (as opposed to HungryWorld).

If you would have me weep, begin the Strain,
Then I shall feel your Sorrows, feel your Pain;
But if your Heroes act not what they say,
I sleep or laugh the lifeless Scene away. 

The thought seems to have been in the air during that last decade of Jacobitism. In 1743 Henry Fielding published the following in a poem called ``Of Good-Nature'' in a three-volume set of Miscellanies. (The ``Name'' referred to is ``Good-nature.'')

What by this Name, then, shall be understood?
What? but the glorious Lust of doing Good?
The Heart that finds it Happiness to please,
Can feel another's Pain, and taste his Ease.
The Cheek that with another's Joy can glow,
Turn pale, and sicken with another's Woe; 

The earliest version or similar formulation that I can find, and probably the one that was most celebrated in its time, occurs in a much-reprinted minor poem of Alexander Pope entitled ``The Universal Prayer, Deo Opt. Max.'' The phrase of interest occurs in the tenth of thirteen stanzas:

Teach me to feel another's Woe;
  To hide the Fault I see;
That Mercy I to others show,
  That Mercy show to me.

There are many similar expressions that are happily forgotten. Here are two such that were constructed with a third-person agent: (1) John Thelwall wrote ``Still prone to feel another's pain, / And to relieve inclin'd'' in a clever boring poem of 1787. (2) Jimmy Carter began an Address to the Nation with ``Good Evening. Exactly three years ago on July 15, 1976, I accepted the nomination of my party to run for the presidency of the United States. I promised you a president who is not isolated from the people, who feels your pain and who shares your dreams, and who draws his strength and his wisdom from you.'' (The pain people were feeling was an oil shortage created when Iran suspended oil exports following the overthrow of the Shah.)

Clinton introduced the phrase while responding to Act-Up member Bob Rafsky, who was heckling Clinton at a March 26, 1992, campaign stop at Laura Belle, a nightclub in Midtown Manhattan. Here's Clinton's key turn, as recorded by CNN and reported by the New York Times:

Let me tell you something. If I were dying of ambition, I wouldn't have stood up here and put up with all this crap I've put up with for the last six months. I'm fighting to change this country.

And let me tell you something else. Let me tell you something else. You do not have the right to treat any human being, including me, with no respect because of what you're worried about. I did not cause it. I'm trying to do something about it. I have treated you and all the people who've interrupted my rally with a hell of a lot more respect than you've treated me, and it's time you started thinking about that.

I feel your pain, I feel your pain, but if you want to attack me personally you're no better than Jerry Brown and all the rest of these people who say whatever sounds good at the moment. If you want something to be done, you ask me a question and you listen. If you don't agree with me, go support somebody else for President but quit talking to me like that. This is not a matter of personal attack; it's a matter of human wrong.

You can be for George Bush, you can be for somebody else, but do not stand up here at my rally, where other people paid to come, and insult me without -- listen, that's fine, I'll give you your money back if you want it, out of my own pocket.

I understand that you're hurting, but you won't stop hurting by trying to hurt other people. That's what I try to tell all you folks. You're not going to stop hurting by trying to hurt other people.

The reason I'm still in public life is because I've kept my commitments. That's why I'm still here. That's why I'm still standing here. And I'm sick and tired of all these people who don't know me, know nothing about my life, know nothing about the battles that I've fought, know nothing about the life I've lived, making snotty-nose remarks about how I haven't done anything in my life and it's all driven ambition. That's bull, and I'm tired of it.

And anybody -- there are other choices on the ballot. Go get 'em is my answer to you. If you want somebody that'll fight AIDS, vote for me, because when I come in to do something, I do it, and I fight for it.

The latest published work I've seen on this is an article entitled ``Harnessing High-Altitude Wind Power,'' in IEEE Transactions on Energy Conversion, vol. 22, no. 1 (March 2007), pp. 136-144. The authors are Bryan W. Roberts, Shepard, Ken Caldeira, M. Elizabeth Cannon, David G. Eccles, Albert J. Grenier, and Jonathan F. Freidin. They reported the design of a 240kW craft.

Frankfurter was born on November 15, 1882, and died on February 22, 1965; he is best remembered for his service as an associate justice of the US Supreme Court from January 30, 1939, until August 28, 1962.

Phillips began his interviews with Frankfurter in 1953, as part of an ongoing oral history project at Columbia University, and the original idea was to produce archival material. According to Phillips's foreword (p. ix) ``During our sessions as we talked our way through his life to his appointment to the Court in 1939, no thought was given to the possibility of publication. ... It was only when the recordings were completed and ready to be filed away for future researchers that a re-reading made it clear that these recorded memories were [worth publishing]. Editing has been done in the interest of providing unity and flow to the work as a whole with relatively few retrospective changes in wording and phraseology.'' I will silently repair the punctuation in any of the quotes from this book that I use in this glossary.

The website <http://www.lafemis.fr/> evidently belongs to the same organization, but while it does mention the historical connection with l'IDHEC, it makes no mention of any INIS. It does mention that since 1998 it has enjoyed the support of the French ministry of culture. More interestingly, the organization is referred to as ``la fémis, école nationale supérieure des métiers de l'image et du son.'' In fact, one may find the acronym ENSMIS used in various places such as sound engineers' résumés, and even once or twice in lafemis.fr webpages.

My best guess is that one string that came with government support was that the school should be nominally national rather than European, but that people liked the old acronym and kept using it informally and unofficially. Moreover, an identically named INIS was already in existence in Quebec, with direct Canadian government support since at least 1990. In view of the namespace conflict, continued use of the already popular F-word must have seemed sensible. Proper obeisance was shown to the national government by the steadfast ignoring of the original expansion of the word and by tactics that obliterate the original sense. The ``tactics,'' as they must seem to any lexicographer, are the use of lower case and an acute accent on the e. The latter disguise is inspired: anyone guessing at an expansion is likely to suppose the e represents École rather than Européenne. Also, because accents have a habit of disappearing on capitalization, anyone aware of the old capitalized form could reasonably suppose that the accent had been there in reality all along. All in all, a well-camouflaged acronym subversion.

FEMMSS is going to be another club for the grievance-as-Weltanschauung crowd, which includes much of the humanities faculty at your better universities. There was an organizational meeting on March 2004 at the Penn State Conference on The Ethics and Epistemologies of Ignorance. For Kant's observation on ignorance experts, see the Idiot entry.

Fermions obey Fermi-Dirac statistics: their total wavefunctions must be antisymmetric. When expressed in terms of single-particle quantum states, this implies that fermions obey the Pauli exclusion principle.

So in original. The period probably should be a semicolon. 

On June 25, 2001, the US Supreme Court agreed to hear a case, Owasso Independent School District v. Falvo, 00-1073, that should be of interest to anyone who teaches or is otherwise humiliated in a classroom. The court will probably have to decide whether classmate grading of swapped papers violates FERPA.

The particular case in question was brought by Kristja J. Falvo in 1998, who sued the Owasso, Okla., school district (in suburban Tulsa). She contended that three of her children were embarrassed when classmates graded each other's work and called out grades to the teacher. A federal judge rejected her claim, but last year the 10th US Circuit Court ruled that FERPA was violated. The act prohibits the release of ``education records'' without parental consent, and the tenth circuit found that grades students record on homework or tests and then report to a teacher are ``education records.''

The regulations are imposed by the usual mechanism: federal monies not to be disbursed to institutions that violate them. This affects virtually all public schools, AFAIK, and apparently few if any private schools.

I've also seen the F of FERPA incorrectly expanded as ``Federal.''

Ottawa used to host a minor-league baseball team called the Lynx. Following the 2007 season, the team moved to Allentown, Pa., to become a Triple-A affiliate of the Philadelphia Phillies. Allentown is part of the rust belt: areas that used to have a thriving iron-and-steel industry and that now don't.

Well, that's not entirely accurate: a down-sized steel industry that employs fewer workers thrives in some places, but I'm not going to do heavy industrial research for an entry that's basically about a furry pig. Oh, all right, I suppose when the research falls in my lap I might as well type it in:

Through much of the 1970's and 80's, the United States, under intense competitive pressure from foreign countries, underwent an often agonizing economic restructuring. New and much more productive methods were adopted to produce goods that could compete with the flood of imports. Steel, which for a century had been the sine qua non of an industrialized economy, was a case in point. In 1974, 521,000 American steel workers were producing 99 million tons. In 2000, nearly exactly the same amount was being produced by only 151,000 workers.

Steele and similar names (stele was the typical Middle English spelling) were also given to people who were just tough. A more recent example of the practice was Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. He was born Iosef Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili (that's a transliteration of the Russian form of his Georgian name). His assumed name Stalin means `made of steel.' It apparently had nothing directly to do with steles, funerary or otherwise. You could be forgiven for thinking so, but you probably wouldn't have survived saying so. The Arabic word for iron is hadid.

Anyway, fast forward back to the global market and so forth, and that article by John Steele Gordon, of all aptronymic authors. The article title was ``Look Who's Afraid of Free Trade.'' The ``who'' turned out to be the Democrats, and Gordon reminded the reader that Democrats have been the party of free trade since the time of Jackson. I'd have written that it had been the party of free trade. I think the surprise implied by the title would have been more appropriate a quarter of a century ago.

Billy Joel wrote a song called ``Allentown'' (1982) about economic hardship, and the mayor of Allentown tried to shake him down for a share of the profits. That's sharper evidence than industrial statistics. I've got family in Allentown, but nobody was ever in the steel industry. One time when I visited in the 1960's there was a 1"-diameter boule of silicon on the kitchen table, and in an odd way that's about as far as you can get from the steel industry and still have anything to do with manufacturing.

Where was I? So the new owners called the team the Lehigh Valley IronPigs and chose a large furry pig as mascot. (No, pigs are not notably furry, but this is a pig of the mascot species. And pig iron is kinda shaggy stuff anyway.) Having introduced or imposed the mascot, and perhaps belatedly thinking that they ought to have some prospective-fan input, they solicited suggestions for the mascot name. There were 7345 submissions, and the most popular name, with 235 submissions, was ``Ferrous.'' Another suggestion was Porkchop, which was the name the owners chose. As they quickly learned following the announcement of the name, porkchop is a derogatory term for a Puerto Rican.

If the team had still been in Canada, this error would have been punished by means of an efficient modern instrument known as a ``human rights tribunal.'' (It's ``efficient'' because part of the torture is the star chamber itself. No need to wait for the inevitable conviction.) Instead, following immediate protests that, absent a receptive government entity, had to go directly to the owners, the team switched to plan B the very next day (December 2, 2007): ``Ferrous.'' FeRROUS (this is the official capitalization as of 2013, since I-don't-know when) wears number 26, the atomic number of iron. (Ferrous is also the mascot of the Aberdeen IronBirds, a Single-A affiliate of the Baltimore Orioles. Given that this differently-named team is in a different league and plays games in a different region, the coincidence of mascot names was not expected to be a problem. FWIW, the last previous time that Allentown had had a major-league-affiliated baseball team was 1958-60; that team was called the Allentown Red Sox.)

At some point, a furry sow named FeFe was added to the mascot lineup. She sports pigtails and doesn't seem to have a number, because she wears team gear but not a uniform. Don't feel bad if you didn't groan immediately at the ``pigtails'' pun. It was years before I noticed that FeRROUS is a pun on feroz, the Puerto Rican word that means `ferocious.' The second syllable is in all-caps because the Spanish word is stressed on the ult.

• AIA
• ART
• ASRM
• DZT
• GIFT
• HAT
• hMG
• INCIID
• IUD
• IUI
• IVF
• MZT
• PID
• ZIFT

In demographics and social sciences today, the term fertility is used consistently to mean what might be called ``manifested fertility'' or perhaps ``fecundity.'' A couple of our entries that mention fertility in this (demographers') sense are kyoiku-mama and WEU. (For the ordinary sense of the word fertility, demographers use ``biological fertility.'')

Fertility is computed by demographers as the number of children born per woman. This expression is a kind of shorthand for the actual mathematical definition. Obviously there are difficulties if one tries to take it as a strict definition. One difficulty is that one does not know how many children a woman will have until she is past her reproductive period (nowadays that is usually until menopause; at various times and places it has often been until death). Hence, for a large fraction of women and girls alive at any given time, one does not know the value of the individual vital statistic. A second problem with understanding the loose definition rigidly arises because fertility varies over time. Even when computing fertilities in the distant-enough past, with all necessary data putatively available, it is unclear how to assign the time in a meaningful way. For example, in one strict interpretation, the fertility rises immediately when a cohort of girls is born who will have a high birth rate years later.

These problems are analogous to the problems of defining life expectancy, and the solution is similar. In any given year, one can know (for the previous year, which is ``current'' in published statistics) how many children are born to women of each age. To compute fertility, one uses that current rate to estimate how many children women currently in each age group will ever have. Thus, the total number of offspring that women who are currently 25 will ever have is estimated by assuming that at age 26 (i.e., the next year) they will have offspring at the same rate as current 26-year-olds, at 27 (two years out) at the same rate as the current age-27 cohort, etc. This makes it possible to fold the current demographic profile (more-or-less known) into an estimate of future birth rate (the current birth rate). There are elementary corrections to this that are based on mortality rates (next year there won't be quite so many 26-year-olds as there are 25-year-olds today, because some will die -- tragically young). When birth rates are changing, one can attempt to extrapolate future birth rates in order to get a better estimate of fertility. There is no real agreement on how to do this, since many of the factors affecting whether women have children are not known, often by the women themselves.

(That's right, it's nothing but a convolution integral.)

Here's a description from Charles Evans & Associates.

Pronounced both eff-ee-tee and as word rhyming with set.

1 wapentakes = hundred (Danish term)  (Odd, though, because Danish doesn't use w much.)
1 hundred = 100 hides (in principle), a subdivision of a shire.
1 knight's fee = 12 hides
1 sulong  = 2 hides (Kentish unit)
1 hide    = 120 acres for tax-assessment purposes (actual area varies)
1 hide	  = 4 virgates
1 hide	  = the land that can be cultivated by an eight-ox plow in one year
1 carucate = 1 hide (in the Danelaw)
1 yoke    = 2 virgates (Kentish unit)
1 arpen	  = 1 acre

(The term ``fill factor'' evidently refers to the fact that power is represented by a rectangle on the I-V characteristic. The simpleminded maximum is the area of a rectangle of height I_SC and width V_OC. The real maximum power is the area of the largest rectangle that can be inscribed from the current and voltage axes to a point on the solar cell's I-V characteristic. The fill factor is the fraction of the former rectangle filled by the latter.)

An alternative discussion of this stuff is at the MPP (Maximum Power Point) entry.

``French fries'' (or just ``fries'') is American for potatoes cut into long pieces and fried. Potatoes fried in other shapes are called by various names -- curly fries, country fries, home [style] fries, hash browns, potato cubes, 'tater bits, Cajun fries, etc.

Originally, ``French fries'' was a more specific term implying that the lengths of potato had been deep fried. That's the impression I have from the Fannie Farmer Cookbook (11th edn., 1965), which defines French frying as a general procedure that we would now call deep frying. (Frying by immersion in hot shortening -- ``fat,'' in the book's definition. Fast-food restaurants nowadays use vegetable oil.) The book offers recipes for both French fries and German fries. The German fries were similar, but the fat was not as hot; they took 15 minutes to fry instead of 5 for the FF. The next time I get limp, soggy fries, I'll complain that if I'd wanted German fries, I'd have asked for them. Realistically, though, nowadays there's no reliable terminological distinction between potatoes deep fried (placed in a basket and immersed in shortening), potatoes grilled on a metal surface, and potatoes shallow fried (my neologism for fried by immersion in tepid oil, since no one would understand ``German fried''). Potatoes are not the ideal vegetable to stir fry.

The term ``French fry'' is surprising to the French; the idea of serving potatoes cut and fried was a Belgian innovation a couple of centuries ago. For all I know, the idea of slicing them twice, so they'd be long instead of flat, was an American innovation. (In Japanese, the names of numbers change depending on the general kind of thing that is being counted. Flat things and long things, for example, get different kinds of numbers.) In French, `fried potatoes' are normally called frites -- more or less literally `fries.' If you wanted to get a bit more specific, it wouldn't be as helpful as you'd suppose. The standard long term is pommes frites, which can be literally translated `fried apples' -- pomme is `apple'; pomme de terre (`earth apple') is `potato.' In the US, road apple is what a horse's behind leaves behind. The French are also innocent in the invention of what is called ``French [salad] dressing'' in the US -- a goop of equal parts mayonnaise and ketchup. ``French toast'' is just the new name that was given to ``German toast'' when Germany became the main enemy and France an ally in WWI. Belgium was overrun by German forces in that war and the next.

Actually, Belgian fries are fried twice, first at high temperature and then at a lower temperature. It seems like a compromise between French Fries and German fries. What the world needs is a truly scholarly cookbook. Fries in the US are cooked in the French way: a single stage.

The true origin of the potato chip is controversial. My own experiments indicate that it's not too easy to make, either.

British `chips' are fried potatoes, but not what most US restaurants would advertise as ``French fries.'' For many years in London, there were merchants who sold freshly fried fish, and merchants who sold freshly fried potatoes, but none who offered both. Selling fish and chips together was a twentieth-century innovation.

The Guinness Book of World Records reports that someone survived more than a year on just potatoes and water. It doesn't say what prompted him to live again.

The elementary school pupil who spelled potato correctly, but was persuaded by veep Quayle to add a final `e,' had his moment of fame afterward; I saw him on the David Letterman show, he seemed like a bright kid. Today, August 8, 1997, the news media reports tracking him down. He dropped out of high school and works for a Pontiac dealer in Trenton. He's still in the vanguard of linguistic innovation, though: he was described as an `unwed father.'

Living in Indiana (IN), the home state of J. Danforth Quayle, I passed by an Arby's recently that advertised ``Potatoe'' something or others. James C. Quayle, Dan's father, died in July 2000.

Somewhere else in this glossary I explain that politicians like classroom audiences because they tend to ask questions keyed to the intellectual level of political rhetoric, rather than to the level of ordinary intelligent conversation. Anyway, something like that. You knew that, of course -- it's obvious. But you don't realize how long it's been going on. I have here before me a dusty old copy of the New York Times ``Week in Review'' section. The lead story: ``Greasy Kid Stuff: Washington Kidnaps Dick and Jane.'' The featured pull-out quote: ``Children are cute, and useful to politicians, in ways that adults aren't.'' It was news that week, so that must be when this political trick was first tried. Sunday, June 15, 1997. There you go.

J. McSavage and S. Trevisan published a study entitled ``The use and abuse of frying oil'' in Food Service Technology [vol. 1, #2, pp. 85-92 (2001)]. They assessed the quality of frying oil discarded by a sample of catering establishments, using a rapid test method to measure the FFA concentration. ``Results show that none of the establishments used an objective assessment method; a lack of consistency between establishments, and many discarding oil where the FFA levels were above the recommended safe level.''

FFC makes Church Pew Cushions! Of course! Why didn't I think of it?

I was sort of a greeter at Gary's wedding (yeah, and taxi driver too), and when Wally and his wife came in, he explained that he considered that attending this wedding would satisfy his personal church attendance obligations for the week. Most weeks, Wally is a Roman Catholic. This week, I told him to put on a yamulka. He told me later that when he went to sit down in the pews, and seeing no knee-rests, it struck him that Jews must be serious masochists about worship. He might be right, but there's no full genuflection in Jewish worship.

Nobody understood the structure of the beast, and its various limbs hardly knew what else they were attached to, so in July 1983, with great fanfare (i.e. with twenty-page glossy inserts in The Economist), FFI introduced a unifying corporate identity, ``Investors in Industry,'' and a 3i logo painted in wavy-edged watercolors, with the dot over the "i" replaced with a drawing of an eye. Except for ICFC, the 3i symbol began to be used as a prefix to the names of the various entities (``3i FFS'' and so forth).

For later developments, see the 3i entry.

• CFF (French)
• SBB (German)
• VFF (Romansch)

Once, in a progress report that Sabine gave to the group meeting, she showed some graphs that led me to ask: ``what about that fine structure?'' At first she thought I was complementing her work.

Sabine is a French babe. There's a French magazine model who looks just like her. Maybe it's the same person, taking a break to do oxide CVD. Have you ever seen them together?

Waiting for our friends to arrive at the Coffee Plantation on Mill Avenue one day, I watched the eyes of the guy I was sitting with (Jay). I said, ``She's taken.''

Another time she joined our table at a peasant-style French restaurant (Suzanne had chosen it; I think she worked there once). As Sabine was about to sit next to me I said ``Sabine, you're so beautiful, why don't you sit across the table from me so I can see your face.'' She replied, ``don't worry, the smoke won't go in your direction.'' After lighting up she mostly held it under the table. When she exhaled I could admire her fine nape and jawline.

Standard social distance is closer in most countries that have a Romance tongue as the one national language. One day I had to explain to Sabine that I was uncomfortable when she stood only one foot away. All that time I guess she thought it was normal for men to lean over her like that. And I guess it was, at that.

``Number two'' is the standard one, appropriate when a nonzero matrix element of the perturbation in the Hamiltonian connects initial and final states. Essentially, the rate is then the (modulus) square of matrix element times the density of final states (energy density), times the famous factor of ``two pi over aitch-bar.''

``Number one'' applies when a transition is dominated by a two-step process involving an intermediate state. This is a second-order process; the squared matrix element is replaced by the square of the product of two matrix elements -- one connecting initial state to intermediate state, the other connecting intermediate and final states, divided by the energy difference between intermediate state and final state.

Fermi's Golden Rules got their name, and their numbering, from a 1950's book (transcripts of the notes of a summer-school nuclear physics course). He was apparently the first to call these formulae ``Golden rules'' in print, and since the number of things named after Fermi was perhaps not commensurate with his achievement, they came to be known as Fermi's Golden Rules. The numbering arises because he treated fission before scattering. The formulas were themselves well known, and had been derived almost immediately after Schrödinger proposed his famous equation. In the course notes, Fermi does not prove the formulas, but simply refers to Schiff's Quantum Mechanics textbook.

Cf. the more widely accepted (by scholars) 2SH and also 3ST (both based on a hypothetical lost source Q).

In 1942, screen siren Hedy Lamarr [using her married name Hedwig (Eva Maria) Kiesler Markey] and composer George Antheil patented (#2,292,387) a ``Secret Communication System,'' based on the use of coordinated rapid frequency hopping by transmitters and intended receivers as a way to avoid surveillance.

On 12 March 1997, the EFF honored Lamarr, 84; her son Anthony Loder accepted the prize on her behalf, and played an audiotaped thank you, the reclusive Lamarr's first public statement in decades.

Considering that the wobblies and WCTU are still with us, one isn't surprised that Future Homemakers survived the widespread ideological victory of women's liberation. However, there've been some changes. In an InfoSeek search of the ten indexed pages at fhahero.org (the FHA domain), there were no occurrences of the words girl or girls (nor, for that matter, of other controversial words like adult, wom?n, or m?n).

Frequency hopping has been very popular in military applications, both because it implements a kind of encryption and because it is hard to jam effectively. For civilian application, there's been much more work (in the late 80's and in the 90's) on direct sequence CDMA, for somewhat less clear reasons: The formal mathematical analysis of DS-CDMA is simpler than that of FH-CDMA; jamming issues are less important; and the difficulty of orthogonalizing FH-CDMA makes it hard to make efficient use of bandwidth.

FWIW, Virginia's City of Fairfax is not a part of surrounding Fairfax County; the city and the county are separate jurisdictions. (It is typical in Virginia for there to be separate jurisdictions for cities and the counties they are ``in,'' but it is not so common for the county and city to share a name.) Many organizations operate within or are concerned with only one of the Fairfax jurisdictions and include ``Fairfax'' as part of their names, but do not indicate which jurisdiction they refer to.

There are British, French, and US versions. All the versions, just like other men's magazines, regularly have a woman on the cover. On the other hand, women's magazines regularly have a woman on the cover. So men's and women's magazine covers have achieved parity and equality of opportunity in the highly competitive modeling market. It's a good thing too, because if there were any sort of asymmetry or inequality of opportunity, it would be necessary to impose a judicial solution. (No, not quotas. Quotas are wrong. We'd just count the number of pictures. Then, in a way that did not affect anyone's legitimate rights or goals, we'd explain to everyone what they'd have to do to achieve balance and diversity, or else.)

Publications of the project so far cost about 200 NOK per volume and have the general title Fontes Historiae Nubiorum: Textual Sources for the History of the Middle Nile Region between the Eighth Century BC and the Sixth Century AD. The most narrowly literal translation of the Latin expansion of FHN would be `sources of the history of the Nubians.'

Gladiator, a sword-and-sandals flick from 2000 starring Russell Crowe, had some scenes in North Africa with Berbers -- Mauretanians and Numidians. Pretty much everything except the sand was inaccurate, and the scholars who wailed and gnashed their teeth about this crime against their discipline suggested that the people who cobbled together the film didn't know the difference between a Numidian and a Nubian. So you needn't feel so bad if you didn't either.

Issue Five (2000) was not too bad. It was clean bad: just bad enough to make me laugh without puking. Inch-deep auteurs with drearily commonplace insights (if any), and a literary style that soars from the ground to the very porch, quite pleased to think each other and themselves artists. Mediocrity would have been easy, or should have been. But if they can continue to maintain consistent submediocrity (I mean world-class submediocrity, not just submediocrity in regions of ethnicity gender memory place), that will be an almost worthwhile achievement.

A ragged line does not a poem make. I'm sure they figured, ``if Iowa can do this, why can't we?'' Might I suggest... lack of talent? Occasionally that can be a stumbling block. Alright, so the entire magazine is a waste, but look at it this way: how many refining and chemicals business people does the world really need?

As I was cleaning out the garage, I came across a March 1974 Final Report entitled ``Coordination of Urban Development and the Planning and Development of Transportation Facilities,'' prepared by Edward H. Holmes for the FHWA. There's a loose leaf inside that serves as a sort of foreword, an FHWA bulletin from Federal Highway Administrator Norbert T. Tiemann, dated July 22, 1974. It explains that Holmes had been Associate Administrator for Planning, FHWA, and was retained by the International Road Federation, which in turn had contracted by the FHWA for the study. (It all seems somewhat incestuous, but it's about the way things have always worked.)

No, that's not all I want to say about that. We're under construction, remember? Like the highways.

Rec.Travel offers some links.

Finnish webpages often have the slightly brownish yellow #FFCC00 background color (<BODY BGCOLOR="#FFCC00">). Hmmm. Seems to be a historical thing now.

Here's the Finnish page of an X.500 directory, and here's a nice geographical map of web servers.

EDUFI is a good first place to look for general information about education in Finland.

Here's the page of the Finnish Tourist Board. The board maintains a useful page of links for country information.

This other entry may have a bit more on Franciscans.

I've always felt that I ought to say something here about Édith Piaf. She was a French singer and an actress (on both stage and screen). Born Édith Giovanna Gassion in Paris, Dec. 19, 1915, she was abandoned by her mother and raised by her paternal grandmother in Bernay, a village in Normandy. (Now that I've actually looked it up, I might as well say that it's in the department of Upper Normandy.) Her father was an acrobat. Let me interject informatively and briefly here that careful scientific research studies would probably show that acrobats are not very down-to-earth people, not people with their feet planted firmly on the ground, and probably their lives often seem to be spinning in the air. Edith's mother was an Italian café singer. (You'll have to parse that yourself. Hint: she didn't sing Italian cafés.) When Edith was still a child, her father began taking her along on tour. Well okay, now I've said something. I'm glad that's done, because it was holding up a bunch of other updates on this page.

Back-constructed expansion: Fix It Again, Tony.

The picture above is of a 1970 FIAT 850 called the Shellette, photographed at the Petersen. [Click for a larger (490 KB) image.]

Now you can never truly say you never knew there were cars with standard wicker interior, or a zero-door FIAT. In this other view (434 KB), it appears that the car may have some anchors for a ragtop, but this was a ``beach car,'' so when it rained I imagine you didn't drive around in it, and maybe parked it under a beach umbrella.

Also in the 1970's, a wicker customization was performed against a Ferrari 365 GTC/4. Fortunately, there doesn't appear to be any graphic online record of this atrocity.

Military government of the British, French, and US Zones of Germany by means of their respective FIATs ... present this volume of the <<FIAT Review of German Science>> in the hope that it will assist in informing international science of research done in Germany through the war years. It is believed that this and its companion volumes will present a complete and concise account [``concise'' you can believe: 270pp. for P-Chem] of the investigations and advances of a fundamental scientific nature made by German scientists in the fields of biology, chemistry mathematics, medicine, physics and sciences of the earth during the period May 1939 to May 1946.

The volume consists of new purpose-written overviews in German. They give you an idea of who did what, but not what they found.

Has been used to define nanoelectronic devices. Here's Hughes's two bits.

Physicians don't all agree exactly on what fiber is or what it really is good for after all, but they agree that you aren't eating enough of it. Eat more, eat a lot of it, eat until you choke. And lose weight.

Okay now, seriously: I mean what I just wrote.

``Fiber'' is a term for more-or-less indigestible organic matter in food. Originally, this was understood strictly -- cellulose, the stuff of cell walls in plants, which humans do not digest. (Cellulose is a glucose polymer with a kind of cross-link we haven't the enzymes to lyse.) However, some organic matter other than cellulose, gummy and woody substances, are sufficiently fermented by microrganisms in the gut that they are to some degree absorbed.

They say that in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. Think about it. Think eye dialect.

From the mathematical point of view, what physicists call a field is usually some kind of function. Note that a ``vector-valued field'' is not a vector field. A physicist's ``vector[-valued] field'' is a mathematician's mapping from a metric space into a linear space. Usually the metric space is pretty trivial too. A vector is an element in a linear space or vector space (different names preferred in different professional, um, fields).

By convention, wavefunctions in ordinary quantum mechanics are not called fields. The word ``field'' is applied in quantum mechanics only when the argument of the wavefunction becomes a field. The name ``quantum field theory'' (QFT) is reserved for these ``second-quantized'' systems.

At the risk of grossly distorting the mathematics, let me try to be more concrete. Consider an elementary particle, like an electron or other fermion. Ordinary quantum mechanics of a single particle is formulated in terms of a simple enough variable -- particle position, say. In classical mechanics, that position is the unique location of the particle. In ordinary quantum mechanics, it so happens that a wave function is defined simultaneously for all possible values of the position variable, describing the probability of finding the particle at each point. In quantum field theory, things again are generalized in an infinite way. The simplest way to visualize this is that QFT for particles like electrons in principle describes an infinite number of particles. There must be a wave amplitude for no particles, a wave function of one particle, a wave function of two arguments that describes the probability distribution for two particles, etc.

Related organizations: CAF (Africa), FFF (France), RFEF (Spain).

Oh sure, there are more boring games than soccer, but no game is more intensely boring.

In August 2007, FIFA vice-president Jack Warner said he would block an English bid to host the 2018 World Cup. He said, ``Nobody in Europe likes England. England invented the sport but has never made any impact on world football.'' What a diplomat.

In the descriptive notation, commonly used only in English-speaking and Latin countries, files are labeled by the pieces originally occupying them. From left to right, viewing from the white side: Queen's Rook (QR), Queen's Knight (QN or QKt), Queen's Bishop (QB), Queen (Q), King (K), King's Bishop (KB), King's Knight (KN or KKt), King's Rook (KR). In the algebraic notation, the same files are labeled a through h.

In record play in the descriptive notation, one typically uses the shortest unambiguous description, such as BxP, if it is clear enough which Bishop captures which pawn, adding a file designation or two if needed, as in BxKtP to indicate that a pawn in a Knight's file is captured, or BxKKtP to specify the King's Knight file, if it isn't obvious. Or maybe it would be easier to specify the file of the Bishop here. For moves that are not captures, one gives the piece moved, followed by a full description of the square: P-K4 means a pawn is moved to the fourth position in the King's file. The position number, or row in the usual configuration, is called the rank. In the descriptive scheme, the rank is counted from the side corresponding to the piece, so a white move P-K4 means that a white pawn is in the fifth rank of the King's file, from the black point of view.

You get the idea.

The algebraic notations aren't nearly so interesting, and they number ranks consistently from the white side.

• Joz's extensions base
• A German-language list, but the expansions and application names are given in the original language (typically English). Quelletext means `source code.'
• A current page for one of the two (dead) links from the next entry.
• A page at Franklin College had good intentions -- it points to two other extensions resources that are defunct. This link stays against the day they update the page.
• At Saugus.net (Rather slow-loading, as of September 2003.)
• Turn off the sound, visit this page and scroll down.

Iceland is a small country where everyone knows everybody else (or maybe everybody knows everyone else, I'm not sure which), so everybody (let's say that's it) is known by first name only. Or rather, last names are not used. Finnbogadóttir is `daughter-of-Finnboga' or something like that. Patronymics are, of course, a common source of family names in European languages (the -son ending in English corresponds to the -sohn ending in German and the -sen ending in Swedish; -s in English and Mac-, O' prefixes in Gaelic languages perform the same function.)

In many Slavic languages, the family-name ending is declined to indicate family relationship. Thus, a descendant of Peter would have the family name Petrov, his unmarried daughter the last name Petrovna, and his wife Petrova. (There are conventional and euphonic variances in the endings used, but the pattern is pretty easy to recognize.) There is an additional layer of patronymics in Russian: it is very common to refer to people not by their given names or by their family names, but by a real patronymic. Thus, for example, since my father's name was Oscar, I would be called Oskavitch.

In case you forgot, this is the Iceland entry. In Iceland, the absence of last names seems to have put a premium on good genealogy. Together with the country's isolation, it has made Iceland an attractive place for really big human genetics research.

During the little Ice Age, Iceland was almost evacuated. Hey wait a second -- this isn't the Iceland entry. This is!

NASD created NASDAQ in 1971, but sold it off in 2000-2001. Today the NASDAQ is just regulated by FINRA.

``FIOB is a community-based organization and a coalition of indigenous organizations, communities, and individuals settled in Oaxaca, Baja California and in the State of California in the United States. This organization was founded on October 5, 1991 in Los Angeles, California. its mission and vision are the following.'' Preceding this are the vision and mission. The Spanish-language part of the FIOB website is slightly less confused. To be slightly fair, however, it appears that for many in FIOB, neither Spanish nor English is a first language (see this page on indigenous-language interpreters).

TV Acres promotes fire safety with an entire pack of firedogs. They're named ``Chuck, Francis, Larry, and Sam.'' It seemed to me that these are unusual names for dogs, although it's reasonable that Chuck should be top dog. It turns out that the names were chosen so their initials would match those of the Children's Fire and Life Safety Project. But why not ``Corky, Fido, Lady, and Scout,'' then?

This pop-up-littered site lists 2000 dog names in alphabetical order. It turns out that on the matter of dog names, as on many other matters, I am woefully behind the times. According to an article in the San Francisco Examiner, Columbus Day 1997, the trend is to give dogs human names.

Of 12,706 dogs registered in San Francisco, 137 are named Max; there is only one Fido. Max is also top dog in Marin.

And of the 10 most popular dog names in San Francisco, seven are suitable for humans; in Marin, all but one are. Molly, Jake, Lucy and Sam are big in both counties.

Of course, there is a sampling problem: most dogs are not registered. This is even supposed to be the case in regulation-loving California. Carl Friedman, director of San Francisco Animal Care and Control, estimated the total number of dogs in the county at about 75,000 to 85,000. His estimate was based on a national average of 25 to 30 percent of households having dogs.

Nevertheless, in 1996, the dog-food manufacturer Kal Kan conducted a survey of several hundred dog owners in New York and Los Angeles, and also found that people names were in vogue and that the most frequent name is Max (nudge). In 2004, Brazilian Congressman Reinaldo Santos e Silva introduced a bill to forbid the use of human names for pets. He didn't expect the bill to pass. I've got an idea -- forbid the use of human names for people! People will use traditional dog and cat names, and there won't be any confusion.

A sign of the times: In February 2004, the first family lost a long-time pet when their English springer spaniel died at the age of 15. She was named Spot. Some time before Christmas, a new puppy (born October 28) will enter the presidential household: Miss Beazley. Miss Beazley is named for the character Uncle Beazley, a dinosaur in Oliver Butterworth's children's book, The Enormous Egg. Spot was born to Millie in the White House during the Bush #41 administration (see Nop's Trials entry. Miss Beazley is half-niece to the current first dog, which has the name Barney. Barney was second dog in the Bush #43 White House until Spot died. It reminds me of John Nance Garner, vice president during Franklin Roosevelt's first two terms, who remarked in 1936 that ``the vice-presidency isn't worth a pitcher of warm piss.'' (See Veep for the more famous version of that remark.) FDR's dog, a black Scottish terrier, was named Fala. During his final presidential campaign in 1944, Roosevelt ordered a destroyer to turn around and pick Fala up after he was left behind on a trip to the Aleutian Islands.

You have to wonder if there isn't a children's-dinosaur connection. A purple dinosaur character named Barney is the star of a children's TV show. The White House Barney is black with a white spot on his neck, and was a gift from Christine Todd Whitman, former New Jersey governor and first head of the EPA in Dubya's first administration. (Dubya -- that sounds like a dog's name!) Barney is the offspring of Whitman's Scottish terrier Coors, named after the beer.

FDR's last vice president and successor as president was Harry Truman. He famously advised, ``if you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.''

Seneca the Younger began a similar analysis in a letter to Lucilius (see Epistulae Morales, Liber XI-XIII [the divisions between these books are not known], epistula lxxxvii) but he did not carry it as far. He wrote:

Actually, when I was starting to write this entry, I was thinking of writing about combustion dangers, but I got sidetracked by the need to provide background information. On second thought, however, I realize that bullets are a kind of fire hazard too.

Okay, bad example. But can you say that kerosene (which does burn) is ever a cause of fire? Of course, you can say what you please. What I mean is: Is kerosene ever a ``cause'' of fire?

I think not: kerosene is just a fuel. I mean heck: oxygen is just as necessary for fire as the fuel is. Are we going to say that oxygen causes fires? Nah, let's not go there. It's the fact of fuel and air coming together under certain conditions that leads to fire. Now then, what causes that? Others have reasoned along similar lines. For example, that flunky for the Forest Service, Smokey the Bear, has been saying for years, ``Only you can prevent forest fires.'' I was never sure if he meant me personally. If he did, he ought to just have called me on the phone, instead of taking out a bunch of expensive broadcast ads. Did he think he could shame me into action by public humiliation? My lethargy is made of firmer stuff than that! (Actually, it's made of 100% inertia; it takes full advantage of Einstein's strong principle of equivalence.)

Well, as it turned out, fire fighters put out some of the ones that were not prevented by whoever was supposed to prevent them, and the rest burned themselves out. But the point here, if there be one, is that Smokey didn't claim that water or low temperatures or dry ice dust could prevent fires, only I (or you; somebody, anyway). Smokey appeared to reject firmly the notion of inanimate objects as causative, and seemed to embrace the notion that causation is coextensive with thinking (or unthinking) agency. This teleological point of view identifies Aristotle's final cause as the cause.

When I took Philosophy I as an undergraduate, I would snigger at Aristotle for being so confused that he could think of the names of things or the material constitution of things as ``causes'' (formal cause and material cause, respectively). Now, thanks to remedial education administered by the Stammtisch Beau Fleuve (SBF), I have learned that the joke has been on me all along. [Oh yeah, thanks a lot, sure.] I see your hundred years of solitude, and I raise you twenty-five centuries of laughing out of the wrong side of your face.

A second-generation national is either the child or the grandchild of immigrants. A third-generation national is the child of second-generation parents, and so forth. It not clear, and fortunately not important, how to apply such definitions when people of different immigrant ``generations'' have children together. Another difficulty in sharpening the definition is that more than one or two generations may emigrate, possibly at different times. To take me, for example: I emigrated to the US as a child with my parents, so I am a first-generation American on my own account, and a second-generation American as the child of my immigrant, first-generation-American parents. When we arrived in this country, my two living grandparents and my one living great grandmother had already immigrated to the US, making me a third- and fourth-generation American by some definitions.

Issei, Nisei, and Sansei are first-, second-, and third-generation Japanese-Americans, respectively. Related entries: FOB, ABC, ABCD, CBC.

Walt Whitman famously wrote in ``Song Of Myself'' (51):

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

``Song of Myself'' was originally published without a separate title in the first edition (1855) of Leaves Of Grass. It only got its current title in the third edition (1882). In the second edition, it was called ``Poem Of Walt Whitman, An American.'' In the poem he asserts that he is not an nth-generation American for values of n less than or equal to, uh, 3 or 4, but he expressed it more precisely. He wrote ``[b]orn here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same.''

One Joe Johnson created and hosts a weekly, hour-long syndicated radio show called Beatle Brunch. A station local to me airs it on Sunday mornings, starting at the ungodly and inappropriately (for Sunday and brunch) early hour of 8am, so it may have been airing for 20 years before I first heard it on January 20, 2012, when the theme was something about the next generation of Beatles fans. Joe Johnson described himself as a ``first-generation Beatles fan,'' and I wondered what that meant. As it happens, the Beatle Brunch website's ``About Us'' page is refreshingly informative, and explains that Joe ``was born near Kennedy Airport in New York, a half dozen years before The Beatles landed in America for the first time. He and his family moved to South Florida to witness the magic of the Fab Four on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1964, and remembers the 8 days (a week) they spent in Miami.''

1. Since the previous round.
2. Noticeable increase in violence.
3. First noticeable increase in violence since the previous round.

Our Algeria links are at the entry for its domain code .dz. See also Argelia, what the hey.

In other news:

``Reef Raiders: Fish Trappers Learn to Live without Cyanide and Dynamite While Stalking America's Favorite Pets,'' by Frederic Golden in Sea Frontiers, 37, #1 p. 22 (1991).

``Fishing with Dynamite,'' in Water Well Journal, 49, #4, p. 28 (1995).

There was a front-page article in the New York Times last fall (below the fold, columns on right; beyond that you're on your own -- try NEXIS) on fishing with cyanide and how it has been affecting the ecology of the sea around Hong Kong.

Hmmm. Just found a clipping from letters to the editor, regarding an October 31, 1995 front-page article. The letter (Nov. 3, page number cut off, from Steven Lauria) gives some interesting historical background. Says old Chinese pharmacopeias identify ``fish-stupefying herb,'' ``break-intestine plant'' and other plants used for preparation of fish poisons. Fish poisoning was banned in the Tang (618-907) and Sung (960-1279) dynasties but persisted, sometimes killing those who ate the fish. In 1121, the Emperor set a penalty for fishing with poison at 100 cane strokes, plus liability for murder in the death of any who died from eating the fish.

Ah! Here's an old email from a fellow Stammtisch person:

Al,
	The tale I referred to is Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the
Cooked (New York 1969; French orig. Mythologiques I: Le cru et le
cuit, Paris 1964) pp. 59-60.  There does seem to be something fishy: note
the single quotes in the following quote from the tale:

	"That same day the Indians organized an expedition to `poison'
	fish and so obtained food for their dinner.  The day after the
	murder the women returned to the fishing ground in order to gather
	the remaining dead fish."  Etc.

The word "poison" is footnoted by L-S as follows: "That is, they threw
into the water pieces of a creeper whose sap dissolves and changes the
surface tension of the water, thus causing the fish to die of
suffocation.  Cf. below pp. 256ff., a lengthy description,
begun as follows: "The mother of diseases on the Bororo myth (M5)
manifests herself during a collective fishing  expedition known as à la
nivrée in French Guiana -- that is, fishing with poison.  This method
consists in suffocating the fish, by throwing into the water coarsely
ground stems of plants of various kinds, usually creepers (Dahlstedtia,
Tephrosia, Serjania, Paullinia, etc.)  The dissolved sap is said to cut
off the supply of oxygen to the fishes' respiratory systems."  A note (25)
on page 257 is interesting: "Fishing with timbo, as practiced by the
Bororo, is a very effective method.  But the fish must be dressed
immediately; otherwise it goes bad and is dangerous to eat."  (In the tale
under discussion (M5 the origin of diseases), a woman eats such bad fish,
swells up and eventually farts infectious diseases into the world.

	Give me Pandora and her "box" anytime!

Incidentally, the original French of ``expedition to `poison' fish'' isn't punny. L-S wrote ``Le même jour, les Indiens organisent une expédition de pêche au << poison >> ....'' More L-S stuff at the floating signifier entry. We're just full of it.

In the Western Germanic languages, the sk sound usually evolved into sh. In Modern German, for example, the noun is Fisch, whose pronunciation is about as close to English fish as you could hope. This was part of a general pattern -- what linguists distinguish as a systematic ``sound shift'' rather than a mere change in an individual word.

Another example is the loan, through the Latin discus, of the Greek word diskos. In Old English (OE) this was disc, and evolved into the modern word dish. This preserves one of the meanings of the original Greek and Latin words. (The modern word disc represents a second borrowing of the same word. For the word disk, well, follow the link.) In later Romance usage, the word underwent a semantic shift to `table,' which we also borrowed as desk and (think `high table') dais. This later sense influenced some other Germanic languages, and Old High German tisc, which was essentially the sound-shifted version of OE disc and had the same meaning as the OE word, evolved into Modern German Tisch, meaning `table.'

(Likewise Dutch, the third major West Germanic language, ended up with disch meaning `table.' The case is more complicated, however, because final sch in Dutch underwent a further shift to an ess sound, and since the spelling reform of 1947, the word has been spelled dis. Returning to fisk, the initial consonant of the Dutch word ended up voiced, and the word was spelled visch and now vis.)

Fisk is a common surname, by American standards -- it ranks among the top 3000. Obviously it's an old metonymic occupational name for a fisherman or fishmonger. One bearer of the surname is the journalist Robert Fisk. He's based in Beirut, and a century ago, in the era when the British Empire had ``orientalists'' based in Egypt, one might have said that Fisk had ``gone native.'' Nowadays, his anti-Western views are about as common in Western universities as in Middle Eastern shanties, which I suppose suggests they might be on a similar intellectual level. Anyway, the blogosphere has verbed Fisk's name. To fisk is to refute thoroughly and in systematic detail. It's something that is done to Robert Fisk's reporting, not by it.

FISP held its first world congress in 1900 (Paris). Since the tenth (1948), FISP has held a world congress every five years. Recently, it seems FISP accumulates another homepage for every world congress (at least Boston 1998, Istanbul 2003).

FISP is a member of CIPSH.

``FAST'' in the acronym expansion is the short standard capitalized form of the company whose longer name is Fast Search & Transfer ASA. Whether this is less nonsensical in Norwegian than in English is unclear, but the compression does seem more efficient in the examples they have chosen to demonstrate it.

FIV is eventually fatal to cats, but probably not dangerous to humans. Just in case though, immunocompromised individuals should erase all copies of WATFIV from their directories.

None of this would justify an entry for this book here, but as I read it (for tawdry reasons that need not concern you, dear reader) I noticed something surprising and familiar: a Ponzi scheme. (MILD SPOILER information follows.)

The premise of the book is that after dying, each person (or each person who goes to heaven -- the distinction is not explored) meets five tutors; it's rather like Scrooge's Christmas Eve in Dickens's A Christmas Carol. (The idea was borrowed again with only slightly greater baldness in the 2008 movie An American Carol. I seem to recall an interview in which director David Zucker explained that he decided to recycle the old gimmick because he had never had much success with his bright new ideas.)

Anyway, the newly dead person meets five less-recently dead people whose lives intersected his. Each one is able to provide a dramatic alternate perspective on some aspect or episode of the newgoner's life. Each one demonstrates that the newgoner's life story was heavily contrived. No wait, that's not it. Each one teaches the newgoner an important lesson, and the lesson typically climaxes in a horribly mawkish catharsis. After this five-fold initiation, the newgoner enters heaven proper, the full presence of God, the harem of 72 (perpetual?) virgins, whatever. Also, he prepares to become the tutor of a future newgoner. (``Newgoner'' is not a term that occurs in the book.)

The interesting thing is that while each new dead person is taught by five dead people, each dead person thereafter teaches only one incoming dead person and is then released from teaching duties forever. This is, as they say of Ponzi schemes, too-generous social welfare systems, and corn farming in Antarctica, unsustainable. In the long run, the promised benefits exceed income. The only way to keep this going without cutting benefits is to cut beneficiaries. New admissions to heaven must decrease literally exponentially. (This I could believe. But there's no hint of it in the book, and it wouldn't be consistent with the generally upbeat, everyone-is-forgiven message.)

In the dedication, author Albom writes that most religions have an idea of heaven, ``and they should all be respected.'' At least he doesn't say they should all be believed. I guess they should all be disbelieved and respected, like crime bosses. I also have a problem with some of the belief systems that don't incorporate a heaven. It used to bother me that many people who believe in reincarnation don't worry about population growth. I mean, a population explosion could produce a severe soul shortage; bodies would have to be equipped with untested new souls that were still wet behind the ears, so to speak. Either that, or there'd have to be a reserve supply of souls kept in long-term storage. So this scheme would at least have a hell. In any case, immediately after a great catastrophe there'd certainly be an oversupply. Maybe this was the inspiration for the population in packing crates described in Woody Allen's What's Up Tiger Lily? (1966).

Truth to tell, I also have a problem with religions that do have a heaven, but some of them do sound a bit more promising. At least Albom doesn't go so far as to say that religions can be respected, although some do. Oh, now I get it: each religion should be respected by somebody who can. Sneaky atheist, that Albom.

I remember when I attended religious school that the principal would periodically come into our class to say something stupid. (I'm not saying that was her intention, but it must have been part of the Plan. Nothing happens without a purpose, I am given to understand. So it was Somebody's intention.) One time she instructed us solemnly that no matter how poor a person is, there is always someone poorer. (Even though the number of people in the world is finite, she neglected to add.) There are really a lot of people in this world (to say nothing of the next) who regard elementary mathematical facts as a nuisance that can properly be ignored.

On April 5, 2005, a court in Suva (Fiji's capital) handed down a sentence for behavior the magistrate described as ``something so disgusting that it would make any decent person vomit.'' The men pled guilty to a charge of ``committing an unnatural offense and indecent behavior.'' They had taken pictures of themselves naked, so one suspects police did not want for evidence. I was motivated to add this to the entry because of the ironic headline that resulted: ``Men Sentenced to Prison for Gay Sex.''

The Villanova University Law School provides some links to state government web sites for Florida. USACityLink.com has a page mostly of Florida city and town links. Visitor information can be found by a virtual visit to Absolutely Florida.

Logic based on truth values in the continuum between zero and one. So true. There's a usenet newsgroup comp.ai.fuzzy, and an associated FAQ. (The CMU archive has an older but more hyper mark-up.)

Just as a logical condition can be used to define the ordinary subset of a set, so a fuzzy logical condition can be used to define a sequence of fuzzy subsets conforming to the condition with increasing strictness or degree of truth (and corresponding decrease in cardinality).

See FL supra.

Flata, flata, flata, flata, flata, flata, flataaah--
Pile it up! Pile it high on the plattuh--

It sounds cut off. With all that pause-filling repetition, it sounds like he he got too far ahead of his interpreter.

In each of the following statements, the words preceding the first comma would probably count as Füllwörter:
``Come now, every word means something.''
``Well, yeah, but still...''
``Look, the first word in this sentence is a verb in the imperative mood; it's an instruction.''
``You know, I'm not sure what I'm supposed to look at.''
``So nu, the first two words are filler.''

``When lift plus thrust is greater than load plus drag, watch out!''

Of course, FLL could be something completely different.

Normally, only the control gate (CG) is electrically contacted, and at low gate voltages the floating gate serves as a conducting slab within the region between control gate and channel. Thus, ignoring short-channel and narrow-channel effects, which are exacerbated, the main effect of fabricating a MOSFET with a floating gate is that gate capacitance and transistor gain factor (``k'') are decreased inversely as the total thickness of oxide between control gate and channel.

Any negative charge on the floating gate raises the transistor threshold voltage of an nMOS transistor. Thus, stored charge can be detected electrically and serves as nonvolatile storage for one bit of data.

Starting from with an initially neutral floating gate, charge can be added by exciting channel electrons and applying a large positive bias to the control gate. Different EPROM's differ in the way the floating gate is charged. Traditional EPROM's used UV light absorption to excite electrons out of the floating gate. EEPROM's and flash EEPROM's have at least a segment of very thin (20 nm or less) thinox layer between the FG and the channel, which allows quantum tunneling between them under acceptable bias conditions.

I remember reading an article in Time or Newsweek sometime in the mid- to late-seventies, which reported that according to some poll or other, Claude Lévi-Strauss was regarded as the most over-rated personality in recent history. I won't say whom I'd have voted for then, if I had known what I do now, but now would be a good time to visit the deconstruction entry.

On the other hand, if you simply must learn more about L-S, you could go fishing for it here.

In the earliest instance cited (1741) there are hyphens after flocci, nauci, nihili, and pili. These four are enumerated in a ``well-known rule of the Eton Latin Grammar'' as words meaning `at a small price' or `at nothing.' In 2004, the term was heaved into a Scientific American article (Dec. 20) about research confuting the belief that boosting self-esteem helps improve academic performance. For more, just follow your NASE.

``FLOTUS''! You got that? Not ``flatus''!

I suppose a presidential floozie would be FLOTPOTUS.

More information, not all of it fanciful, at the POTUS (President Of ...) entry.

You know, writing ``flour'' for ``fluor'' is a pretty stupid error. It's not the sort error you'll find in this glossary; I've got an editor.

See also the Land Surveyor Reference Page.

The theory of relativity does not forbid travel faster than the speed of light, strictly speaking. However, it does imply that for anything massive, it takes infinite energy to get up to that speed. In principle, however, tachyons (hypothetical particles moving hyperluminously) or other massive objects might be created already moving faster than the speed light, so they don't have to cross an infinite-energy barrier. No one has ever come up with a credible mechanism for creating more than one or two tachyons in this way. The comment that ``nothing can go faster than the speed of light'' is shorthand for ``I don't believe in `time travel'.''

There is a more precise statement, that ``information cannot travel faster than light.'' This includes the movement of matter, of course -- the arrival of a stone can convey whatever information has been inscribed on it. One kind of faster-than-light motion that is allowed is apparent motion: If you scan the sky with a flashlight, and if you see its reflection on distant planets like the image of headlights through fog, then (a) you have very good eyesight, better than 20-20 anyway, and (b) the image can travel gazillions of miles across the sky in as little time as it takes you to turn your wrist. This is faster than the speed of light, but no information flows that fast. For example, if the flashlight beam is reflected by a circle of planets 5 billion light years away, and you turn the flashlight beam 180° in one second, then the beam image will move (really: the image will appear to travel) across about 15 billion light years in one second, for an apparent speed of about 15 billion × (1 year/1 second) = 45 × 10¹⁶ times the speed of light, which everyone agrees is quite fast. However, to see this image you're going to have to wait ten years while the light goes away and returns. Ten years later, sure enough, the image of high speed that you've set up appears, the reflection of your flashlight beam flashes across the sky in one second. However, no information has traveled faster than light. There's been plenty of time for information to travel out to the stars, poking along merely at the speed of light, and set up the celestial illusion. (Of course, if the planets were not equidistant to within a fraction of a lightsecond, then you're out of luck.)

More of this at the ICBM entry.

``In contrast, it is impossible to divide a cube into two cubes, or a fourth power into two fourth powers, or in general any power beyond the square into powers of the same degree; of this I have discovered a very wonderful demonstration. This margin is too narrow to contain it.''

Eric Zorn, in his column on page one of the Chicago Tribune METRO section, reported (June 29, 1993) the celebratory high spirits just six days after Andrew Wiles announced his victorious proof of the FLT. It was eerily reminiscent of events following Chicago Bulls NBA Championship victories.

``Math hooligans are the worst,'' said a Chicago Police Department spokesman. ``But the city learned from the Bierbach riots. We were ready for them this time.''

When word hit Wednesday that Fermat's Last Theorem had fallen, a massive show of force from law enforcement at universities all around the country headed off a repeat of the festive looting sprees that have become the traditional accompaniment to triumphant breakthroughs in higher mathematics.

Mounted police throughout Hyde Park kept crowds of delirious wizards at the University of Chicago from tipping over cars on the midway, as they first did in 1976 when Wolfgang Haken and Kenneth Appel cracked the long-vexing Four-Color Problem. Incidents of textbook-throwing and citizens being pulled from their cars and humiliated with difficult story problems last week were described by the university's math department chairman, Bob Zimmer, as ``isolated.''

(According to Eric Zorn's column on June 19, 2001, Eric's father Jens is a full-time professor at the University of Michigan. Zorn is also an important name in mathematics.)

Erica Jong's Fear of Flying -- A Novel (1973) was a best seller.

Nancy L. Rose's Fear of Flying? Economic Analyses of Airline Safety (1991) was not.

In the US, the flu typically kills about 30 or 40 thousand mostly elderly people each year. However, most flu viruses do not kill directly; they damage cells lining the the upper respiratory tract, exposing infected persons to airborne bacteria. Most flu-infected people who do die are actually felled by bacterial pneumonia. (That's why antibiotics, which do not act against viruses, are nevertheless prescribed for flu.) The Spanish flu of 1918 evidently killed more directly, by causing severe damage deep in the lungs, associated with severe edema and hemorrhage. (The severe immune response provoked by the infection also played a part in this.) A difficult reconstruction of the Spanish-flu genome in 2005 confirmed that it was an H5N1 virus, like the avian flu causing concern at this time. This avian flu seems to kill directly in the same way as the 1918 flu. It extended its range alarmingly in 2005, but as of October there is no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission.

It is clear that violin solos, like viral infections, cause respiratory irritation and, in particular, loud coughing. The question, as with flu lethality, is one of mechanism. Mike Nichols, writing in the New York Times on October 2, 1977, hypothesized exogenous rather than endogenous causes for the coughing at theater opening nights:

Opening night . . . you will find a sizable number of people with severe respiratory infections who have, it appears, defied their doctors, torn aside oxygen tents, evaded the floor nurses at various hospitals and courageously made their way to the theater to enjoy the play -- the Discreet Choker and the Straight Cougher.

David Warren's column on the Benazir Bhutto assassination only came out on January 2, 2008 (he had taken a vacation). It turns out that like just about everyone else in the chattering classes, he had known her personally -- in Pakistan, no less. Among his observations:

She thought in English, her Urdu was awkward, her ``native'' Sindhi inadequate even for giving directions to servants. Part of her political trick, in Pakistan itself, was that she sounded uneducated in Urdu. This is as close as she got to being ``a woman of the people.''

There you have it: an advantage to lack of fluency. Now you have an excuse.

In Japanese, FM is called efuemu. That's a transliteration of ``eff em,'' the English pronunciation of the FM initialism. (You can't really get rid of the u's. See eizu for a little clarification of why.)

The FMAP is the ``federal financial participation'' (FFP) for medical expenses (including screening, diagnosis and testing; hmm, see EPSDT). The FFP for general administrative expenses, including outreach, is a flat 50%.

CHIP programs are funded at the ``enhanced FMAP'' computed as 0.3 + 0.7xFMAP or 85%, whichever is less. CHIP FFP for administrative expenses and outreach gets more complicated.

Westfield Firemen's Mutual Benevolent Association Local #30 is the labor union and fraternal organization that as of 2004 represents the paid members of the Westfield NJ Fire Department. Westfield FMBA Local 30 was established on June 27, 1924.

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

The basic idea of fluorescent microspheres is pretty straightforward: you inject a number of spheres in one part of the vascular system and you count them someplace else, and this gives you a quantitative idea of how fast blood moves around. You count them by shining an exciting pulse of light and measuring the intensity of fluorescence. Unfortunately, a lot of biological materials fluoresce, so fluorescent dyes have to be chosen carefully and contamination avoided. This is one reason to use the lowest-frequency light possible for excitation (to minimize the interference from naturally occurring fluorescent materials). With the proper precautions, the fluorescence (emission) intensity is an accurate measure of microsphere count. Because the injected spheres are diluted in dispersion throughout the body, small-number statistics (standard deviation varying as the square root of the sphere count) is a significant contribution to the measurement error.

Fluorescent microspheres have been adopted as an alternative to radioactive tracer methods. I guess microspheres are used, rather than free dye, because chemical interactions with the solvent (blood plasma), and in particular the effects of varying pH on free dye would shift the emission frequency.

When you point your browser to the linked URL (or any other file in that domain), the browser window expands to fill the screen. Why does this seem strangely in character? The same behavior obtains for the Farsi pages, but not for Arabic or Turkish.

If a large-bore needle is used, the procedure is called a ``core biopsy.'' Ugh. I never had any aspiration to become a physician. If the needle is thin, it's called fine-needle aspiration.

Okay, okay, it's in Batavia, IL, to be exact, between Geneva and Aurora, and you pass by Ronald Reagan's alma mater on the drive between it and Chicago. There used to be a diner NE of the lab, called ``The Depot.'' Are they still in business? Sadly, I don't see them on this extensive list. The page gives distances and price ranges, but -- possibly because it's served by a theorist -- it fails to list one very important piece of information: hours. More specifically, which places are open all night, as the Depot was.

First evidence for the bottom quark was obtained at Fermilab in 1977 with the discovery of the upsilon. The upsilon is a meson with ``hidden beauty.'' ``Beauty'' is a now less-used synonym for the quark flavor known as bottom. The flavor is ``hidden'' because the meson consists of a bottom quark and a bottom anti-quark, so it has zero net bottomness.

I was at Fermilab that Summer working in another group, and my boss (my faculty sponsor) arranged for me to have an interview with Leon Lederman. Lederman headed the E288 collaboration which had just discovered the upsilon, so it was pretty generous of him to take some of his time then to interview a callow undergraduate who was just trying to avoid being a screw-up over at E441. He was known for various other achievements in experimental elementary particle physics, although the upsilon is what finally earned him a physics Nobel. Fortunately, I was so clueless that I wasn't cowed or anything. I don't remember too much about the interview. I can't even remember whether the point was for me to make a good impression for when I applied the next year to his home institution (Columbia University), or for him to make a good impression for Columbia should I be accepted. Probably a bit of both. He was a personable guy, and for whatever reason I was accepted by Columbia's graduate program in physics. I went to Princeton instead. Lederman left Columbia to become the head of Fermilab.

One thing I do remember about that Summer is that there was a spoof issue of Fermilab's local newsletter, apparently orchestrated by Lederman's collaboration, that amounted to the first semi-official announcement of the upsilon. It included such things as an interview with a janitor, respectfully recording his pride in the contribution that his work had made to the discovery. I can't find anything about this spoof newsletter on the Internet, but I'll look around and try to talk to some of the old-timers in that field. Maybe it turned out later that it wasn't a spoof. Still, as it was explained to me at the time, they were afraid of being scooped by another group before they were ready to make a certain announcement (there was in fact an ``oopsilon'' earlier in the saga). Despite the small number of accelerators and groups in a position to make the discovery, this was not an idle fear. A couple of years before, the ultracautious (and reputedly micromanaging) Sam Ting had been forced to share a Nobel (with Burton Richter) for the discovery of the charm quark because he waited too long to make the announcement.

That's not the most elaborate emoticon you've ever seen. Trust me -- I know.

Before the creation of the FNMA, the market for home mortgages was a relatively straightforward thing. Certain kinds of banks of the sort we call thrifts would accept deposits by private individuals and use the money to back their issuance of mortgages. The mortgages would be held by the mortgagees (the issuing banks or, as we say now, the ``initiating banks'') for their full term.

Since banks did not resell mortgages, the issuing of mortgages used up their liquid assets and the number of mortgages they could issue was sharply limited by their deposits. FNMA changed this by creating a secondary market for mortgages. They would buy mortgages from the savings and loans, so the latter could turn around and issue more mortgages. The FNMA itself either held the mortgages on its own books or repackaged them as mortgage-backed securities (MBS's) for sale to investors. Because the FNMA was a government entity, it was backed by the proverbial ``full faith and credit of the United States'' and was thus able to borrow at low rates than individuals, and it financed its operations on the difference between the higher rates earned by the mortgages it held and the lower rates at which it could borrow.

The preceding is based on ``Speculators, Politicians, and Financial Disasters,'' an article by John Steele Gordon in the November 2008 issue of Commentary. (If the name looks familiar, it may be because I relied on another of his articles for the ferrous entry. With a name like Steele, how could I not?) Probably to avoid introducing complications, he neglected to explain the banks' need for liquidity in detail. I explain that at the ARM entry.

In 1968, during the Johnson Administration, the FNMA was turned into a government-sponsored enterprise (GSE), independent of the government, owned by and responsible to its stockholders. In the process, part of FNMA's business that was aimed at helping ``low- and moderate-income homebuyers'' was split off and retained as a wholly government-owned corporation called the Government National Mortgage Association (GNMA, known as ``Ginnie Mae''). The MBS's issued by FNMA (now just a GSE, so its paper was no longer formally backed by the government) continued to be highly rated as before, largely because people figured, or gambled, that if FNMA got in trouble the government would swoop in to bail them out. That was in fact what happened in 2008, when the US government ``took over'' FNMA.

You like this stuff? Go see our majorette entry.

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government and industry economic reports
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Daybook provides schedules up to a month in advance (excluding the President's) so that ``lobbyists, attorneys, the media, public affairs and government relations offices, trade associations, policy analysts and [other bloodsuckers] whose responsibilities include monitoring government and political activity'' can ``keep track of the many events and activities in the Nation's Capital.''

FNS Daybook is published by Federal Information Services Corporation and includes freelance articles and features such as classifieds.

The term is also used for a friend of President Bill Gates (William H. Gates III). That is probably the dominant use already in 1997, as Bill C. is a lame duck with a lame foot.

Hmmm. There's been some water under the bridge since I wrote that line.

Cf. ABC, ABCD, and CBC. In less acronymic times, a century ago, a common equivalent of FOB was green-horn or greenhorn.

Not a technical term in electrostatics.

It was apparently Johannes Kepler who first used the word focus in the sense of a special sort of geometrical home point. The first published instance is in his 1604 treatise on optics, Paralipomena in Vitellionem:

Nos lucis causa et oculis in mechanicam intentis ea puncta focos appellabimus.

Dipole magnets are used for steering, quadrupole magnets for focusing. The problem is that quadrupole magnets focus in one plane containing the beamline, and simultaneously defocus in the perpendicular plane containing the beamline. The solution is to alternate the orientation of successive quadrupole magnets. Viewed along either plane, the beam is alternately focused and defocused, but the net effect of the pair of operations is to focus the beam slightly. It's a little bit reminiscent of alternating-direction implicit (ADI) numerical integration.

A sequence of FODO pairs is often referred to as a ``FODO lattice'' or ``FODO channel.'' Sorry, not the FOOD channel.

For example, there are about two trillion barrels of recoverable oil in US deposits of oil shale. Oil shale is currently used in Germany, Israel, China, Brazil, and Estonia, but we haven't been able to overcome the technical hurdles. Also, there are about 10 billion barrels of petroleum under Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, but we mustn't drill there because of the lush biodiversity at Arctic latitudes.

And there are an estimated 85 billion barrels of recoverable oil and 420 trillion cubic feet of natural gas under the outer continental shelf, but we mustn't drill there either. We mustn't build more refineries or nuclear or coal-burning power plants, because in the long run it makes more sense to send trillions of dollars to unstable third world kleptocracies and theocrazies. We must build windmills, but not if they can be seen from Martha's Vineyard. The only ugly thing allowed in my back yard is my legislator, so long as he's on a short leash. We should make alcohol by fermenting corn and grasses, and it will generate enough fuel to power the tractors that harvest it. As a side benefit, it will raise the price of grain and save the small family farm.

So what power sources can supply a foe of energy? Well, a typical star -- like the Sun, for instance -- radiates on the order of a foe of energy over the course of its entire life. Unfortunately, it lives billions of years, so you can wait a long time to get what you want. It's kind of like having a rich uncle in excellent health.

Another problem is that the drip-drip-drip of energy is not delivered direct to us; instead, it is scattered as light radiating in all directions, so that heedless aliens on distant worlds could see one more twinkling star in their sky, if they bothered to turn any of their eyes in our direction. What a waste. As it is, the power flux density of light from the Sun, at a distance of one astronomical unit (here we are, baby), is about 1000 watts per square meter. Plants collect this by using chlorophyll and some Rube Goldberg-like chemical cycles, with an overall efficiency of a fraction of a percent.

Little of this has anything really to do with foe, of course, but that sort of thing never stopped me before. Apparently the foe unit was coined by the astrophysicist Gerry Brown of SUNY-Stony Brook. It's a convenient unit for describing the energy released in the explosion of a supernova over the course of its lifetime (measured in seconds).

The syllables foo (q.v.) and bar, as well as various others are used as alternate variables.

It is just barely conceivable that this might have some etymological connection to fubar. The decisive flaw in this hypothesis is that hackers are much too clean-minded to descend to such vulgarity.

When I wrote the preceding paragraph, it was meant ironically. Boy, do I have foo on my face. According to the Jargon file, which represents thousands of hours of speculation and also some research by subscribers to relevant newsgroups, foo has an independent origin preceding the WWII-vintage fubar. Presumably the use of foo and foobar as metasyntactic led to similar use of bar.

See the foo and foobar entries in the Jargon File.

Did you say food bar?

Cf. foobar.

I used to think that was the only meaning, but the other day I noticed that the classroom doors in O'Shag have plastic plaques advising

Food and drink items are not allowed in the classrooms.

I'm not sure that's really clear enough. You know, words can convey information, so it's a mathematical fact that more words can convey more information. Let's try it, shall we not?

Things that are food and drink items are not allowed in the classrooms.

Food and drink were also forbidden in Hesburgh Library. (And the aluminum-can recycling bins were on the second floor.)

Cf. the thoughts at this food product.

At the store, food items like meat and potato chips are ``groceries'' for tax purposes. Food items are theoretically consumed in portions or helpings called serving sizes, which often differ from the quantities in which they are packaged and sold.

In Pennsylvania prisons, a breakfast loaf contains prunes, eggs, toast, hash browns, bacon and orange juice. That's what Fox News reports, but perhaps the loaf is served with orange juice.

Many years ago, in a book of anecdotes about great chemists, I read about an experiment done by Robert Williams Wood. Wood (1868-1955) was famous as a spectroscopist and is usually described as a physicist, but we won't quibble. I seemed to remember that this this experiment was done when he was at Harvard, but he was only there for his B.A. Second guess: Johns Hopkins. He was living in a boardinghouse, and he suspected that the woman who ran it was recycling scraps from one meal into the next. One day at dinner he left a nice morsel of meat uneaten, but salted with strontium chloride. The next morning for breakfast he brought the necessary equipment -- I imagine a candle would have sufficed -- took a bit of the hash they was served and put it in the flame. It burned with the characteristic reddish hue of strontium (Sr).

(I can't recall the title of the book, from before -- probably way before -- 1982, so details here and in the preceding paragraph are from memory.) The strontium story suggests that Wood was a tough customer. None of the stories about him suggested that he was a nice guy. During one of the Solvay conferences (I guess the second, in October 1913 in Brussels), Marie Curie demanded that no one smoke cigars. Wood and some other cretin did, and she walked out.

The origin of the WWII term is plausibly associated with Bill Holman's ``Smokey Stover'' comic strip, begun in 1935 and syndicated through the Chicago Tribune. Foo was one of a number of recurring nonsense words used in the strip, in various apparent senses. Smokey rode a two-wheeled firetruck called the Foomobile. The wheels were side-by-side, as on a modern Segway scooter, rather than fore-and-aft, as on a bicycle. So the word foo was associated with paradoxical or apparently technologically advanced vehicles. It was also associated with smoke, particularly in Smokey's oft-repeated ``Where there's foo there's fire.'' It's been suggested that this foo is related to the French feu (`fire'). (The common English word curfew, of course, is ultimately from an Old French expression, spelled variously as cuevre-fu, quevre-feu, covre-feu, and coevrefu in Anglo-French, `covered fire.')

[The most obvious intellectual sloppiness in the F.O.O.L. is that the poles represent two points in what is really an at least a two-dimensional ``spectrum.'' It is posited that hero worship is indicates externally-directed decision-making behavior focused on admired others, and ``blame'' indicate externally-directed analysis (and failure to take personal responsibility) focused on despised others. The admiration/contempt variable and the decision/analysis variable don't always coincide in this way, and it's not clear that the second variable (decision-making or normative, final-cause analysis, versus positive or efficient-cause analysis) can be usefully regarded as a continuous variable.]

I bought Your Erroneous Zones second-hand in 1980 or so, and just decided to skim it now (December 2, 2003, around 8pm). Chapter IX (pp. 176ff) is entitled ``Putting an End to Procrastination--Now.'' Maybe that should have been chapter I.

Seen on a pizza box lid, under the heading ``Domino's Pizza Proverbs.'' Maybe they should have thought this one through, but I guess they were in a rush.

I also have a definition of foon. It's accurate, but afaik it has only been used in this glossary. It's short for ``foo, Numerical.''

On Columbus Day (well, October 12, anyway), 2000, Australia's Advertiser included the following in a basketball news round-up:

AT last it can be revealed. The reason NBA scouts have not swarmed all over 215cm Italian sensational Gregor Fucka is because of concerns over acceptability of his name.

But Fucka - pronounced Foosh-ka - says he is comfortable with ``Gregor'' and will not change it for anybody.

If you can't be out of town, you can root against the home team. If rooting has some effect, that might help them lose and lower attendance.

Because you've been good and read all the way down to here, you get a treat! I'm going to reward you with a taste of my favorite footnote, a model of mincingly careful word selection, of fancy foot(note)work. It has been extensively reprinted, along with the text it is an ornament to. It's footnote number 1, on page 13 of my paperback second edition of the 1931 work mentioned at the .ru entry.

As an illustration of the danger of disregarding the historical background we may quote the following example taken at random. The authoritative and useful volume, Soviet Russia in the Second Decade (A Joint Survey of the Technical Staff of the First American Trade Union Delegation, edited by Stuart Chase, Robert Dunn, and Rexford Guy Tugwell, New York, 1928), contains an interesting article by Professor Tugwell on Soviet agriculture. The author puts considerable emphasis upon land surveying, the creation of enclosed holdings, the organization of experimental farms, and the advancement of general education among the peasants. These developments, it seems, are among the chief reasons which led Professor Tugwell to form his very optimistic conclusions as to the outlook of Russian farming. No indication is given in the article that all these measures are not new. Professor Tugwell is undoubtedly perfectly familiar with the land reforms of Stolypin which revolutionized land tenure, and were directed against communal ownership. He must also know of the immense work carried on by the zemstvos in the field of education, public health, and the spread of agricultural knowledge among the farmers; and also that before the War an ever increasing number of experimental stations and model farms were opened every year by the Department of Agriculture, especially in connection with the Stolypin land settlement plan. None of these facts, however, is mentioned by Professor Tugwell, probably for lack of space; and those of his readers who have little knowledge of pre-revolutionary Russia will get the impression that all of these important measures originated with the Soviet government when, as a matter of fact, they are merely a revival, and not infrequently a very inadequate one, of a policy pursued by Imperial Russia for a great many years. The optimistic forecast by Professor Tugwell, we venture to suggest, will lose some of its point if the developments he describes are connected with their historical setting.

Sometimes authors detonate such things in parenthetical remarks. For example, Arthur E. Gordon begins chapter V (``Summary and Criticism of Modern Views'') of his The Letter Names of the Latin Alphabet thus:

[Friedrich] Marx is easy to criticize. He was only twenty-three when he published his dissertation, so his failure to present the evidence of Ausonius, Terentianus Maurus, and the other grammarians whose testimony favors the sonant/syllabic names of the semivowels as against ef, el, em, etc., is perhaps understandable (though it does seem rather strange that he was so consistent in presenting only one side of the case, and even stranger that his edition of twenty-two or twenty-three years later does not present the missing evidence, and that, despite having Schulze's paper by the time he published volume 2 of his edition, he answers only one point made by Schulze, about the credibility of the anonymous commentator on Donatus on the subject of Varro).

Gordon himself is also easy to criticize. His entire book consists of stating and repeatedly restating others' arguments, and other others' counterarguments. It's one of those books where you find yourself asking, ``well, what does the author think?'' Eventually, you flip forward to page 65 and read:

I end therefore with no confidence that I have all the facts or, if I have, that I have interpreted them correctly. But I have presented all the evidence available to me.

Hmmm. According to the Wikipedia article on the A-B effect, The earliest prediction of such an effect was made by Werner Ehrenberg and R.E. Siday in a paper of 1949: ``The Refractive Index in Electron Optics and the Principles of Dynamics,'' Procs. Phys. Soc. vol. B62, pp. 8-21 [doi:10.1088/0370-1301/62/1/303]. Yakir Aharonov and David Bohm independently rediscovered the effect and published in 1959: ``Significance of electromagnetic potentials in quantum theory,'' in Phys. Rev. vol. 115, pp. 485-491 [doi: 10.1103/PhysRev.115.485]. Informed of the earlier work, Aharonov and Bohm cited the paper of Ehrenberg and Siday in their second paper on the phenomenon (``Further Considerations on Electromagnetic Potentials in the Quantum Theory'' in Phys. Rev. vol. 123, pp. 1511-1524 [doi: 10.1103/PhysRev.123.1511]. That wasn't exactly what I had in mind. I'll have to keep looking.

wavefunction, which appeared -- properly credited -- in a footnote to someone else's work.

Willard R. Espy reportedly addressed the pressing problem of difficult-to-rhyme words in The Game of Words (New York: Bramhall House, 1971). I don't happen to have that work handy, but among his many works of word play is An Almanac of Words at Play (New York: C.N. Potter, 1975), which is handy. For 18 February the almanac has ``Impossible Rhymes.'' Espy quotes

To find a rhyme for silver
Or any ``rhymeless'' rhyme
Requires only will, ver-
bosity and time.

This solution to the silver rhyming challenge was devised by Steven Sondheim and published in the correspondence section of Time magazine, incidentally demonstrating the importance of such rhyming problems, and the eminence of the heroes who attack them. Inspired by Sondheim's achievement, Ira Levin came up with two solutions to the penguin rhyming problem as well as another silver rhyme. It begins to appear, or be clear, that color words, while prominent in the difficult-rhyme discipline (witness orange and silver, and also purple), do not exhaust the subject.

Place names in particular are also a rich source of challenges. Espy offers solutions for three of these. F.P.A. rhymed Massachusetts with ``or two sets.'' Espy himself rhymes Speonk (a town on Long Island) with he-onk and she-onk. This strikes me as highly unnecessary. Timbuctoo (as it was spelled by Samuel Wilberforce -- I suppose by the Samuel Wilberforce -- back in the day) was rhymed with characteristically religious-themed ``hymn-book too.'' Thomas Huxley observed that Bishop Wilberforce had an unfortunate prediliction for wading in over his head in unfamiliar waters (not Huxley's words); this might be another instance, but I'm not familiar with all the pronunciations of Timbuktu or Tombouctou.

Among other difficult rhymes from the Victorian era: R.H. Barham rhymed velocity with ``cross it, he'' and Lord Byron rhymed intellectual with ``hen-pecked you all.'' Evidently, the Victorians talked funny. (And we won't even get into Lord Byron's ``Don Juan.'')

A private communication from O. V. Michaelsen provides some important information from his book Words at Play: Quips, Quirks & Oddities. It turns out that there are a number of less-well-known words that rhyme with silver and purple. They only rhyme with one: either the word silver or the word purple. So far, no word has been found which rhymes both with purple and the word silver. Or indeed with purple and with any word that doesn't rhyme with purple. It's that hard. Rhyme would be an equivalence relation if words were considered to rhyme with themselves. Oh yes, some of the words: curple is a horse's ass -- its buttocks, rather, and sometimes the buttocks of another animal. In the right sort of sentence, I suppose it could refer to the hindquarters of both a horse and an animal that is not a horse, but we're not going to get into that. Don't look a gift horse...

Another purple rhyme is hirple, a British word meaning `hobble' or `walk lamely.' You wonder if there wasn't some influence one way or the other between hirple and curple (which sounds like a scrambled cripple). I guess if your knees pointed backwards you'd hobble too. That reminds me of Mickey Rivers, who played outfield for the New York Yankees in the late 1970's. He only seemed to flow smoothly when he ran. The best description I ever heard of him loping back to home after beating a foul to first was this:

(Exercise for the reader: rephrase this using curple.) His odd appearance walking is easy to understand. Rivers (``Mick the Quick'') was like one of those racecars that doesn't have a low gear -- he had two speeds: FAST! and off. He couldn't actually walk, so what he would do was turn on the speed for a millisecond and then coast for a few steps. They say that if you're running low on gas along a flat road, one way to make the remaining gas last is to do something similar: periodically take the car up to speed (gently), turn off the ignition, coast down to very low speed, and start over. Sounds pretty chancy to me. Many early airplanes, including some that flew in WWI, had no throttles; the only way to slow the engine (other than a little bit, by climbing) was to turn it off. (Here's some QuickTime footage.) That sounds even chancier to me.

Anyway, chilver, a British dialectal term, means ewe lamb or ewe mutton.

There are proper nouns that rhyme orange, purple, and silver, and you can find a bunch of them (both toponyms and personal names) in Michaelsen's Words at Play. I like Blorenge, the name of a 1,833-foot hill -- one of seven in the vicinity of Abergavenny, Wales. And take this hint from a pro: don't wear your erudition on your sleeve -- just ease Blorenge into your everyday rhyme conversations (cf. I did, did I?) without all the added information. If someone challenges you, you can toss off the wisdom in bits, like crumbs to the pigeons: ``a hill in Wales ... oh, it's pretty prominent for thereabouts -- more than half a kilometer high ... mmm, near Abergavenny ... there are some others ... seven all told ....'' You'll look that much more impressive, and everyone will be sure to have died of boredom before the depth of your shallow erudition is plumbed. If no one challenges you, hire a shill.

Michaelsen's next book also dealt with month (another tough rhyme, if millionth doesn't do it for you). (Espy cites a couplet by Christina Rossetti that rhymes month with ``runn'th.'') This Michaelsen book has this limerick:

There once was a dunce known as Orange
Who got his toe caught in a door hinge.
Said he, turning purple,
Proceeding to hirple,
Now how will I get back to Blorenge?

and its palinode:

A passerby named Mr. Wilver,
Who traded his horse for a chilver,
Offered Orange the lamb,
But he mounted a ram
And rode home yelling, Oh, Hiyo Silver!

Many years ago, the Stammtisch Beau Fleuve sponsored a search to find `the' other word that ends in -gry, in addition to angry and hungry. We found a couple, but they're not exactly common words. The alt.english.usage FAQ has an exhaustive discussion. See also the rec.puzzles FAQ list and ``archive.''

In case you're not satiated yet, we have a little more on rhyme at the rhyme entry. In German, a difficult ending to match is nf. Yes, there's even a rhyming pair; it's discussed at the fünf entry.

Although Kong appeared huge, the full figure was really only 18 inches tall. Miss Wray knew him by the arm, which was 8 feet long.

``I would stand on the floor,'' she recalled, ``and they would bring this arm down and cinch it around my waist, then pull me up in the air. Every time I moved, one of the fingers would loosen, so it would look like I was trying to get away. Actually, I was trying not to slip through his hand.''

Lying on the ground, Charlie Brown yelled at Lucy, ``There's no body-checking in golf!!!''

Forecheck, backcheck, paycheck.

``Backcheck,'' particularly in this context, sounds a bit like back pay. Back pay is something pro hockey players will not get when the circumstances described under GOODENOW are resolved.

Writers of science fiction seldom spare their characters: they may slam their heroes' ships into planets or send their heroines to kill tigers with knives; they may freeze them into statues on Pluto or shoot them through exploding suns. Hardly any degradation or suffering is spared -- with the exception of exposing them to the rigors of learning a foreign language.

Among the retorts when I quoted this to the Classics List:

• C. J. Cherryh [sic] writes science fiction that often deals with language issues. Her Foreigner series looks at the problems of alien-human communication and language, and has a translator as protagonist. She offers a Latin tutorial on her website.
• In Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, Valentine Michael Smith, as part of starting a sort of religion, makes his devotees learn Martian.
• Janet Kagan (``Hellspark'') and Suzette Haden Elgin (``Native Tongue,'' et al.)'' are other science fiction writers who write in depth about alien languages.
• Languages are important to Ursula LeGuin in, for example, A Wizard of Earthsea, Left Hand of Darkness, and The Author of the Acacia Seeds.
• Jack Vance uses the idea of language itself in sophisticated ways, often making his hero go through the drudgery of learning a language.
• In Star Trek, of course, the language problem was eventually addressed explicitly by the contrivance of implanted universal translators, but Spock's experience of Vulcan mind meld certainly seemed to be almost as agonizing as learning a new language.
• Not to mention J.R.R. Tolkien.

No quiet murmur like the tremulous wail Of the lone bird, the querulous nightingale---

When reason's day sets sunless, rayless, joyless, Better to die and sleep.

The Stammt... err SBF acronym and abbrev. glossary: a free public service, paid for by funds embezzled from a widows-and-orphans trust.

You probably don't want to read that the translation he transcribed was that of the 19th c. poet William Mackworth Praed, reprinted in Mark Van Doren's Anthology of World Poetry, but now it's too late -- you already did. You should have stopped reading after the words ``don't want to read.''

He had been a businessman until 1944, when he began a three-year stint as Secy. of the Navy.

The name FORTH was intended to suggest software for the fourth (next) generation computers, which Moore saw as being characterized by distributed small computers. The operating system he used at the time restricted file names to five characters, so the "U" was discarded. FORTH was spelled in upper case until the late 70's because of the prevalence of upper-case-only I/O devices. The name "Forth" was generally adopted when lower case became widely available, because the word was not an acronym.

There's an email list named FIRE, and an FAQ is available.

For a flavor of the language, see Michael Neumann's extensive list of sample short programs in different programming languages. It includes nine Forth programs.

It was a common expression in the English-speaking world, of course, since it's an English expression. It was interesting to read the phrase in a The Lost War, by Masuo Kato. Kato had attended school in the US and was a correspondent for Japan's Domei news agency who had covered the coronation in London (1937) and had worked in Washington for most of the time from then until December 8, 1941, when he was interned. It is relevant that he was reading American newspapers until the day before his deportation the following June 18. His book was published in 1946 by Alfred A. Knopf. On page 85, describing a stop in (Japanese-occupied) Saigon on his way home, he writes of his group (reporters and officers) being ``elaborately entertained at the Continental Hotel with what turned out to be the last full-fledged foreign-style meal I was to enjoy for the duration--plus.'' I wonder if there was some Japanese phrase accurately translated by ``for the duration,'' and what its connotations might have been. I'll try to find out.

There have been a number of versions off the main line of development. Perhaps the most influential was the Fortran created for Digital's vaxen. Others include WATFOR (well you might ask), WATFIV, Formac, RATFOR (RATional FORtran), FORTRAN-D, F, LIFT, HPF, UNICOS, and Vienna Fortran (VF).

A moderately reliable fortune file attributes the following substantially correct observation to Alan J. Perlis:

You can measure a programmer's perspective by noting his attitude on the continuing viability of FORTRAN.

Michael Neumann's extensive list of sample short programs in different programming languages includes four Fortran programs.

The introductory comments at the beginning of a book, directed to the reader and often written by a person different from the author of the book's main text, are not a ``forward.'' Forward is an adverb indicating direction. The word you want is the noun is

FORE...WORD, get it? A WORD (or two, metonymically speaking) beFORE.

If you want to think of the forepart of this word (fore) as a golf term, fine. Just don't write ``forward.'' If you still have trouble remembering how to spell the word correctly, use ``preface,'' or if that's too hard, just use prolegomena or prolegomenon.

Or mix and match! The following is presented as an existence demonstration, and not as an endorsement of any sort (other than of the spelling of the word foreword). My text is entitled Your Neighbor as Yourself (1997). (Actually, it has a double-colon title, with capitalization and punctuation inconsistent between cover and title page. What do you expect? It was published by the small-to-nonexistent Cross Cultural Publications, Inc.: CrossRoads Books, with a PO box in Notre Dame, Indiana. Setting aside the content, it's not a bad book considering that it obviously hasn't had the benefit of editing.) Anyway, about a dozen pages into the section titled Introduction, there's a collection of items entitled ``Introduction,'' compiled by Michael McLuhan (son of the famous Marshall McLuhan). The first item is a ``preface'' (by McLuhan -- the sixth and youngest child, by the way). The second item is in the form of a letter from John Kenneth Galbraith, containing remarks that he eventually decided to leave out of his book The Good Society. This is the ``foreword.'' The third item is a ``prologue'' by the author.

This expression is generally used in two ways. The original sense is simply a lie told to secure ``your'' cooperation. For example, if the traffic-court prosecutor calls and offers you a plea bargain ``for your convenience,'' so you can avoid the hassle of showing up in court, etc., it means that the cops in that jurisdiction are even less likely than usual to show up for a minor court appearance. This usage at least shows thought, and a minimal sort of transparent cunning.

Over time, a second usage has arisen, in which ``for your convenience'' is thoughtlessly used in lieu of explanation of something manifestly inconvenient for you. An excellent example of this is a reduction of office hours for your convenience.

And BTW, your call is important to us.

Give up? Good choice. The term ``feature of size'' is not a term whose meaning is readily derivable from its component words and apparent syntax. It is simply, or not simply at all, a term defined within the language of geometric dimensioning and tolerancing (GD&T). A common definition seems to be ``one cylindrical or spherical surface, or a set of two opposed elements or opposed parallel surfaces, associated with a size dimension.''

A ``feature'' is defined through its plural: ``Features are specific component portions of a part and may include one or more surfaces, such, as [punctuation sic] holes, screw threads, profiles, faces or slots. Features may be individual or interrelated.'' Apparently some of these features are not ``associated with a size dimension.'' The word feature features in other parts of the GD&T language.

It's okay in English to say that you are ``full'' after eating (though it's appreciated if you're not very specific about what you are full of). In German, it doesn't sound too good to say ``voll.'' Better say ``ich bin sat.''

For that matter, don't translate ``I am hot'' too literally either.

Truth to tell, they're all slightly acidic rather than basic. Incidentally, the first naturally occurring organic substance to be identified as a base was morphine.

The four zebras are a referee, umpire, linesman, and line judge, (in approximately that ranking, in cases where overlapping responsibilities require a pecking-order resolution). A back judge, field judge, and side judge may be added, usually in that order. The chain and down-marker crew is normally provided by the home team and supervised by the linesman (who is supposed to caution them, as ad hoc though junior members of the officiating crew, not to cheer or coach).

1. A small depression. (We're not talking dysphoria here, more topography.) From the Latin word with the same meaning and spelling, whoa!
2. A small region in the center of the retina that has a high density of cones and no rods, and which provides high-acuity vision in the center of the eye's FOV. From the New Latin fovea centralis.

1. Hunting foxes.
2. Hunting foxes of a, you know, nonvulpine sort -- vixens. It helps to be a good horseman.
3. Locating hidden radio transmitters.

No, no; just kidding. `Pitch' also has the meaning of spacing. Fine pitch means close spacing of repeated features (in microelectronic and nanoelectronic lithography, at least.)

Also: a strike, if yours is the team in the field.

The alternative to floating point is fixed point. This is essentially an integer representation: one chooses a smallest storable value, and every number is represented approximately by an integer multiple of that small value. Monetary systems are like that.

Cf. mantissa.

The preceding judgments are relevance-weighted and guaranteed off by no more than about 8%.

There's a Financial Planning Association of Greater Indiana. Not ``Greater Indianapolis,'' mind you, but greater Indiana. It's an interesting notion. I suppose Niles, Michigan, could be part of greater Indiana, since it's part of the greater South Bend area, by some accounts. Then by similar reasoning, Gary, Indiana, would be part of greater Illinois. Probably what we should do is define Voronoi cells around the state capitals -- using a local version of the Manhattan metric, of course. I think it's also cool that the URL for this regional association contains the letters G-R-I-N-D.

Here's an FPGA links page.

Sometimes people call them Xilinx (pronounced ``zai links''), after the dominant maker of FPGA's.

The main functional components of an FPGA are an array of configurable logic blocks (CLB's), switch matrix blocks (SM's), and Input/Output Blocks (IOB's). The interconnect lines form a rectangular lattice with SM's at the intersections (where vertical and horizontal connect lines cross).

CLB's occupy the rectangular cells defined by the interconnect lattice, but are connected locally only to the four SM's at the nearest corners.

IOB's anchor the connect lines at the edges of the chip.

Other schools in Mons: FUCAM, UMH.

Once, over champagne after an FPO (I think it was Joe Abeles's), the most senior professor present (Prof. Rubby Sherr) was asked if anyone ever failed the FPO. He replied that once, one of his own students failed,

Central Florida has the Florida Orchestra, but this has no standard initialism, so it's impossible to include any information about it in this glossary. Oh wait -- it's ``TFO.'' Okay then. According to a footer I once saw on its webpages, ``[t]he Florida Orchestra [was] recognized as Tampa Bay's leading performing arts institution, one of the leading professional symphony orchestras in Florida, and one of the best regional orchestras in America.'' There was also a Central Florida Philharmonic Orchestra, apparently short-lived (2003-2004?), apparently formed in the Summer of 2001 out of the still-warm ruins of the Central Florida Symphony. I haven't sorted out the relations among all these symphonies, but their personnel picture is probably roiling.

Unlike figures dragged in an image application, paper figures did not automatically align with the axes of the document-- You listening, boy? Yeah? Okay, whaddidI say? Just what I thought! Listen, you snot-nose cyberweenie, I was designing double pentodes with a twelve-scale slide rule before you wet your first superabsorbent disposable diaper. Just because you're piling up the dough designing program interfaces don't mean you're so smart, you just picked a good time to get born.

Now where wuz I? Oh yeah, so there was a time when ``computer'' meant someone who used a calculator, and for a while after that, a ``page designer'' referred not to a computer application but only to a person. That person would lay out a page on paste-up boards, sort of like the graphics equivalent of a draft. Cheap, bad pictures could be used on the paste-up, since they were only there to help determine where the high-quality illustrations would go in the final layout. To avoid any mistake, the pictures in the paste-up were labeled ``FPO.'' You remember what that stands for?

Good, because it seems a lot of people didn't. They remembered what it meant, but not what it stood for, so they'd write stuff like ``For FPO'' or ''For FPO Only.'' This kind of thing happens a lot.

The speed change came with the new projectors needed for sychronized sound. Synchronized sound was achieved by encoding the sound as a transparent line to one side of the images. The width of this line, or the amount of probe light it transmits, is the amplitude in an AM encoding.

Later, a second line was added for two-channel stereo. Intuitively, one might expect the two lines to correspond to the two channels. A major problem with this approach, however, is that old projector machines would have to play one or the other channel. Instead, stereo is encoded as sum and difference signals, with the sum signal located where the old monaural track was located and old projectors would play the sum signal. In stereo-capable projectors, the difference signal is separately added to or subtracted from a copy of the sum signal to produce two channels. A similar approach is used in radio, with the difference signal multiplexed at a distance in frequency (from the sum signal's center frequency) that is greater than the highest audible frequencies.

The AM scheme for talkies described above is analog encoding, and movies for general distribution still carry these sound stripes for backward compatibility. (Hence, two levels of backward compatibility are built in -- for analog stereo in the digital stereo era, and for mono in a stereo era.) The digital sound signal is encoded in packets along the line of sprocket-holes -- that is, between the sprocket holes.

When NexGen came out with a pentium clone (the Nx586), they only offered FPU as an option and focused on integer performance. They put their justification on the web. Their basic point is that FPU calls are rare in ``the most popular programs...''

There are two FPU's on a Pentium III, three on an AMD K7.

Some French search engines:

Ecila

Lokhace

Nomade

Here's the French page of an X.500 directory. The France.com site is in English.

French sign language is explained in this old classics-list posting. (BTW, the word is préservatif.) Hmm, it seems I also incorporated the content of that posting into the I dunno entry.

Sober links:
• Assemblée Nationale.
• Présidence de la République (English)
• Le site du Premier ministre

Discovered by Marguerite Perey working at the Curie Institute in 1939, which in other respects was a pretty bad year for France.

Edwin Newman includes the following footnote in the second chapter of his A Civil Tongue (I don't recommend the book):

De Gaulle, by the way, could speak English. When he visited the United States at the end of 1959, I went along, as NBC's Paris correspondent, to help in the coverage. There was a reception at the French Embassy, and as I approached de Gaulle I saw one of his associates nudge him and tell him I was there. He looked down at me and said, ``I am very happy to see you here.'' Whether he spoke in English because he was in Washington and thought it fitting or did not want to provoke me into speaking French, I never knew.

For another anecdote suggesting the limited English proficiency of an American, read the experiences of Walter Matthau a paragraph or two under the Pasteur eponym rubric.

In the movie The Great Race (1965), Professor Fate (played by Jack Lemmon) turns out to have an uncanny resemblance to Prince Hapnik (played by Jack Lemmon). This leads to an extended episode in which the Professor impersonates the Prince. The perfesser's loyal sidekick Max (Peter Falk), innocently working at cross purposes to his boss, disguises himself in the robes of a friar (who will have a terrible headache when he recovers consciousness) and frees fellow racer Leslie Gallant III (Tony Curtis). A general brings the Professor the news.

Professor Fate: Leslie escaped?
General: With a small friar.
Professor Fate: Leslie escaped with a chicken?

The usual simple definition is

(Fr)² is a ratio of the scale of inertial forces to gravitational forces. (Sometimes the formula given here for (Fr)² is itself taken as the definition of Fr.)

In open-channel flow, L is the channel depth y, and V is the average flow velocity. Since gy is the squared velocity of smooth shallow waves in a shallow channel, the Froude number is the ratio of the average flow velocity to the velocity of surface (gravity) waves.

More old news you can use, if you're imaginative enough: at the end of the movie ``Animal House,'' the subsequent history of the major characters is given (lettered in front of them as they are seen in the parade/riot episode). ROTC officer Doug Niedermeyer of Omega House is described as ``killed in Vietnam by his own troops.'' This movie, filmed in 1978, was the third directed by John Landis. In his segment of Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983), some soldiers are overheard discussing ``fragging Niedermeyer.''

If you must use Framemaker to write up your research, then switch to a research field in which there are no equations.

Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, ``giving women the franchise'' meant amending a government's constitution so women would have the right to vote.

A McDonald's franchise is the right to operate a business under the McDonald's trademark. Such a franchise is granted to individual entrepreneurs subject to a variety of contractual obligations. Read about it in this article in Startup Journal. (The article is from 1999 -- about the last time I ate there.) Becoming a McDonald's franchisee is a lot like joining the army, except that you have to put a half a million dollars up front, you have a good chance to get richer, and there's no shooting in most of the stores. Okay, two out of three. The US armed forces operate over a hundred different training schools. McDonald's operates Hamburger University (on the campus of company headquarters in Oak Brook, Ill., near Chicago). You can finish faster and it's ``tuition-free'' (after the $45,000 fee you pay at signing), but the selectivity in some years is tighter than Harvard University's.

Generally speaking (i.e., not just fast-food restaurants) a franchise may be granted on more or less exclusive terms (i.e., with a commitment that similar or nearby franchises will not be granted). An exclusive retail franchise is thus a kind of monopoly (not considered a restraint of trade if other companies can compete). This sense of the term is extended to include anyone who has some sort of monopoly. Thus, one might say that for a few years, Meg Ryan owned the romantic comedy franchise.

For a while, Kevin Costner was to baseball movies what Meg Ryan was to romantic comedies. He starred in Bull Durham (1988), Field of Dreams (1989), and For Love of the Game (1999). Yes, there were other baseball movies in that period. Yes, Costner also made some movies in that period that I'd rather not get into.

In Bull Durham, he plays Crash Davis, a veteran minor-league catcher. He's coaching ``Nuke'' (up-and-coming young pitching sensation Ebby Calvin LaLoosh) on the fine points of what to do when he makes it to the bigs (called ``the show'' in this show). On a bus trip...

Crash : It's time to work on your interviews.
Nuke: My interviews? What do I gotta do?
Crash: You're gonna have to learn your clichés. You're gonna have to study them, you're gonna have to know them. They're your friends. Write this down: ``We gotta play it one day at a time.''
Nuke: Got to play... it's pretty boring.
Crash: 'Course it's boring, that's the point. Write it down.

A later scene shows him after he has made it to the bigs, reciting the same clichés to a reporter, who is busily taking notes.

For another example, see the entry HE for Hessen/Hesse.

The word frass was borrowed from German in the mid-nineteenth century by English-speaking entomologists. (At the time, it was also written frasz, the sz indicating that an unvoiced ess sound is preceded by a metrically long vowel. Technically, a double ess shortens the vowel, and a single ess would imply voicing of the ess if inflection put a vowel after it. In modern orthography this is all taken care of by using the old Fraktur s-z ligature and regarding it as a single letter, so the word is written Fraß.) The German noun is related to a verb fressen. Fressen is the animal version of essen, `to eat.' It corresponds to one sense of the English verb feed. Where in English, we would say that a farmer feeds the cow and the cow feeds on grain, in German one would say equivalently that ein Bauer füttert die Kuh und die Kuh frisst Korn. (Fressen undergoes a stem change to become frisst in the third-person singular. The past-tense root is fraß.)

The OED's earliest cited English use of the word frass is from The Entomologist's Companion by H.T. Stainton (London: J. Van Voorst, 2/e 1854). (The second seems to be the only edition that any research library owns.) Stainton wrote:

The half-eaten leaves attest but too surely that some devourer is near. These indications of the presence of a larva are expressed in the German language by the single word frass, and we may, without impropriety, use the same word for the purpose of expressing the immediate effect of the larva's jaws, and the more indirect effect of the excrementitious matter ejected by the larva.

In English the word has (also, if the word is appropriate) come to be used in reference to the refuse left behind by boring insects, such as the sawdust generated by beetles burrowing into a tree. Boring insects are interesting! (Or your house.) Kill them! I'm inclined to take Stainton's word, but the acception of Fraß that he gives has escaped the notice of all general lexicographers of German from the Grimms on down, so far as I can tell.

The closest most dictionaries come directly to the English-speaking entomologists' sense is to define Fraß as the food eaten by predators. However, Fraß has also been used to describe slovenly eaters -- humans who eat like animals. From there it is not much of a stretch to have Fraß mean the mess that a messily-eating insect makes.

The Spanish word fresa (discussed at fruta) has nothing to do with fressen. I figured I'd mention that first and get it out of the way. The verb fressen is cognate with the English fret. The current common sense of the verb fret was originally expressed by phrases like ``fret oneself'' -- i.e., to eat oneself up with worry. Shakespeare uses the word both reflexively and intransitively (with the same sense, iiuc). He also uses the transitive verb in the sense of ``provide with frets'' (like a guitar), always figuratively (``...yon grey Lines, That fret the Clouds, are Messengers of Day'' -- Julius Caesar). He rather plays with the word, tangling its different meanings. The clearest instance of a pun is in this from Hamlet to Guildensterne:

Why looke you now, how vnworthy a thing you make of me: you would play vpon mee; you would seeme to know my stops: you would pluck out the heart of my Mysterie; you would sound mee from my lowest Note, to the top of my Compasse: and there is much Musicke, excellent Voice, in this little Organe, yet cannot you make it. Why do you thinke, that I am easier to bee plaid on, then a Pipe? Call me what Instrument you will, though you can fret me, you cannot play vpon me. God blesse you Sir.

A herald from the defeated enemy approaches King Henry V at the field of Agincourt and makes this speech:

No great King:
I come to thee for charitable License,
That we may wander ore this bloody field,
To booke our dead, and then to bury them,
To sort our Nobles from our common men.
For many of our Princes (woe the while)
Lye drown'd and soak'd in mercenary blood:
So do our vulgar drench their peasant limbes
In blood of Princes, and with wounded steeds
Fret fet-locke deepe in gore, and with wilde rage
Yerke out their armed heeles at their dead masters,
Killing them twice. O giue vs leaue great King,
To view the field in safety, and dispose
Of their dead bodies.

Here fret seems to function as a past participle meaning ``bound, tied.'' That sense, already archaic in the bard's time, is appropriately close to the Old French freter, and properly means to bind with a hoop or ring. It is the origin of the guitar-fret sense.

Ian Fleming's You Only Live Twice contains an explanation of its title: ``Once when you are born and once when you look death in the face.'' (What if you go into a coma?) Yet the title can't help but remind one (and suffer by the comparison) of some -- let's call them immortal -- words from ``Julius Caesar'':

Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.

I only wonder if Fleming also had in mind the dead knights killed twice. Anyway, let's get back to fretting.

King Lear, in Act I, Sc. 4, unforgettably, curses his evil daughter Gonerill:

Heare Nature, heare deere Goddesse, heare:
Suspend thy purpose, if thou did'st intend
To make this Creature fruitfull:
Into her Wombe conuey stirrility,
Drie vp in her the Organs of increase,
And from her derogate body, neuer spring
A Babe to honor her. If she must teeme,
Create her childe of Spleene, that it may liue
And be a thwart disnatur'd torment to her.
Let it stampe wrinkles in her brow of youth,
With cadent Teares fret Channels in her cheekes,
Turne all her Mothers paines, and benefits
To laughter, and contempt: That she may feele,
How sharper then a Serpents tooth it is,
To haue a thanklesse-Childe. Away, away.

Here fret can have the sense of ``abrade.'' This is close to the (originally Germanic) eating sense, but is considered distinct and probably is ultimately from the Latin fricare, `rub.' And I haven't even mentioned the ``carve'' extension of the ``abrade'' meaning, to say nothing of the lace-and-ornamentation-related meanings! The truth is, this one set of letters has enough meanings and spells enough etymologically distinct words that just to write ``fret'' is to pun. See its entry too. (Amazingly, fricare is not supposed to be the source of the English word frig.)

Almost -- cut my hair! It happened just the other day.

Don't be givin' in an inch; let your freak flag fly. Odds are fifty-fifty you have your grandfather's X chromosome anyway, in which case you'll go bald iff he did.

1. adj.: A euphemism. ``Freaking'' is not an equivalent.
2. pres. part. vb.: Freaking out. Experiencing apoplexy; suffering a seizure; having a conniption; throwing a fit.

   While many are aware that Newton's particulate theory of light included a concept of ``fits'' to explain interference phenomena, the sense of the word ``fit'' in his explanation is probably misunderstood more often than not. He did not mean that some path length of traveling light ``fit'' a particular length, as we understand wavelength fits within interference structures. Rather, he meant that at certain distances, the particle of light would experience an abrupt event, like a fit. A later generation of physicists, attempting to explain another phenomenon associated with wave interference, coined the term ``quantum jump.''

``Soft recovery'' may be specified, in which case low-voltage characteristics are recovered to within a tolerance called the ``soft factor'' (0.8 is typical).

Redundantly, this is typically called a ``FRED Diode.''

But that wasn't my point. King ended his speech with these words:

And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, ``Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!''

In the spiritual, the freedom the singer refers to is the freedom of the grave. Most of the versions of the spiritual that are available on the web differ from the version quoted by Dr. King. If you want to track down different versions, include the string ``King Jesus'' so your search isn't swamped with texts of King's speech. But that wasn't my point either.

Ernest (``Fritz'') Hollings (D-SC) was 70 years old when he won election in 1992 to his sixth term in the US Senate. He evidently didn't expect to run again, and at the victory celebration on election night he exclaimed.

I don't have to get elected to a bloomin' thing. And I don't have to do things that are politically correct. The hell with everybody. I'm free at last.

Fritz Hollings was a colorful character, but these remarks were somewhat at variance with the pieties he normally expressed during campaigns. I recall that there was a particularly saccharine bit in an interview he gave during his unsuccessful campaign to be the Democratic presidential candidate in 1984; he explained that he first got the idea of going into politics when he saw the good that government could do. (I can't find that interview now. You'll just have to take my word.) But I don't mean to disparage Hollings any more than King. The former also did his part for civil rights; his leadership as governor of South Carolina between 1958 and 1963 insured the peaceful integration of that state's schools.

Hollings decided to run again in 1998, and footage of him speaking the words quoted above was aired by his opponent's campaign. He won again and served out his seventh term. But that wasn't my point. Come to think of it, I didn't have any particular point; I just felt like bringing together a couple of striking instances of the head term.

• Maeve Binchy's Tara Road (comes with pronunciation key to author's name)
• Barbara Taylor Bradford's A Sudden Change of Heart (yes, I believe I will have fries with that triple bypass)
• Nora Robert's River's End (delta)
• Elmore Leonard's Be Cool (a heartfelt plea for ice cream)
• No particular author Chicken Soup for the Couple's Soul (kinky!)
• Lisa Scottoline's Mistaken Identity (wow, a novel premise)

Evidently selected by the Coca Cola book expert for the joint-marketed pleasure of the kind of people who drink Diet Coke. They guess things about my reading preferences that I never suspected. I also find that they increase the structural integrity of the packaging-cost-optimized 24-packs. When you slip your hand in the carry slot, try to pull the excerpt toward your palm and use it to distribute the force you exert on the inside of the box.

FWIW, the domain for the Detroit Free Press (Detroit's leading fishwrap) is <freep.com>.

Not what you expected, huh? Beginning to regret that two-hour call to your cousin in Rangoon, now, eh?

Back when Mr. Coulter, my high school electronics teacher, was in the Signal Corps in 'Nam (.vn), arranging connections to call oneself around the world was entertainment.

I have learned
To spell hors d'oeuvres
Which still grates on
Some people's n'oeuvres.

If you aspire to this, or to an even higher level of French language competence, then you may find useful the English French Bridge (not to be confused with the Chunnel) as well as the ARTFL French-English Dictionary Form.

It's neither true nor very well known, but you read it here first: 97.22 per cent of the world's literate population is fluent in French, but virtually no one uses the language for fear of having his or her accent ridiculed by a native speaker. For more on shame-related language behavior, see the Polish, Belgium (.be), Broken English, and Denmark (.dk) entries. Heck, read the whole glossary (this could take a while).

This website offers to conjugate your French verb. Trust the French to come up with something kinky like that. Incidentally, some of the best French dictionaries are available free on line (TLF_i, Littré).

I wasn't reading newspapers much in 1969 -- I only learned about this because Robert brought the news item in for show-and-tell or some similar class assignment during the 68-69 school year. Anyway, either it was clear that the woman had used dog food as a spread for her husband's sandwich, or we all or at least I just assumed that. It's been a few decades, and Rob says he's hazy on the details, but he'll let me know if he remembers anything. The fact that the wife hadn't eaten any of the meat herself might stand as evidence for the dog-specific food hypothesis, it seems to me. Eventually, a neighbor's kid admitted to killing the dog by dropping an iron on its head from a window.

I was originally reminded of this story when I ran across a web page of somebody's (Jay Cross's, I think) trip to Nice, France. At the bottom of the page there is this:

Since it's illegal to import food into the U.S., I can't imagine how this happened, but somehow my dogs tried French dog food for the first time last night and absolutely loved it! Latte, who has some doggie eating disorder, gobbled down his rabbit and ran over to lick Smokey's bowl. This morning, they both dug into their agneau vigorously.

Well, he did mention earlier that he'd bought 87 euros' worth of ``truffles, mustard, honey, and special salt.'' The hardest work in looking for truffles is keeping the animal (one uses a pig or a dog to sniff them out) from devouring the truffles as soon as they're dug up. That, in turn, reminds me of the beginning of Gulag Archipelago. The relevant facts are mentioned at the bima entry.

Similarly, the French once used the term lettre anglais. It might have helped me to have remembered that during the adventure I am surprised to realize I have not foisted on this glossary yet. Anyway, the relevant point was that after biking 25 kilometers uphill in the rain to Condom just so I could say that I had bought some there, I whipped my moisture-engorged French-English pocket dictionary out of my pocket and discovered that the critical vocable wasn't there. You cannot imagine my chagrin. It's a bit gauche to use sign language for this particular item, and in Condom even an English-speaker might have had some difficulty ``getting it'' if I had said I wanted to buy a condom.

A tight, impermeable barrier of protective amnesia has enveloped the main thrust of that experiment in social intercourse, but I do remember that I got what I was after. In case you ever find yourself in a similarly sticky situation, the word is préservatif. It's Präservativ or Kondom in German. That's what the farmer thought I was. German, that is. I met the farmer when I encountered a meadow full of curious cows where my map said a road should be. I was lost. All reference works failed me that day. After we got the nationality issues squared away, I finally got to use sign language. For example, here is how the farmer communicated ``You are very far from Chateau de Bonas'':

1. Repeat ``Chateau de Bonas.''
2. Widen eyes.
3. Slap forehead once.

(English borrowed forms of Caesar at least three times. The current form, which has sometimes been written Cesar, apparently takes its pronunciation from French and its spelling from Latin.)

As languages in Iberia evolved, somewhat in parallel, the sound associated with ç evolved as well. By the seventeenth century, the old system of three voiced and three unvoiced sibilants had collapsed. There remained only three unvoiced sibilants, and more than enough letters to represent them. In Spanish as in French and Italian, c is no longer marked when it is soft before an e or i. Instead, c is simply regarded as having a different sound when followed by either of those vowels, and marked only when the sound is exceptional. Like Italian, Spanish has a trick to force a hard sound (a qu spelling is used). The role of the ç comes in the complementary case, when the c is soft. In Italian, one simply inserts an i after the c, and in Spanish one replaces the c with a z. (In Aragonese, the letter z had represented the voiced sound dz corresponding to the unvoiced ts represented by ç.) In French, one uses a ç for a soft c not followed by e or i, as in aperçu, façade, français, François, garçon, leçon, and Provençal.

(In New Castilian, the principal modern dialect of Spain, the pronunciations of ce, ci, and z evolved further in a less usual way: the s sound became an unvoiced th sound. The reason is not certain, but it is presumed to have something to do with Basque, which had no voiced sibilants. Basques made up perhaps as much as a third of the Christian forces in the Reconquista.)

1. American English: the french fries
   French: les frites
   phoneticonics:
   L :-|}
   FR 8-[) T
2. American English: the freedom fries
   French: les frites de la liberté
   phoneticonics:
   L :-|}
   FR 8-[) T
   D :-||
   L :( )
   L 8-[) B 8-(| RT :-))
3. American English: french toast
   French: pain perdu
   phoneticonics:
   P :=(|
   P :-(| RD 8-o
4. American English: cheese-eating surrender monkeys
   French: primates capitulards et toujours en quête de fromages
   phoneticonics:
   PR 8-[) M :( ) T
   K :( ) P 8-[) T 8-o L :( ) R
   :-|}
   T :-o Zh :-o R
   :=()
   K :-|} T
   D :-||
   FR :-[( M :( ) Zh

In 2006, during the doubtless not-entirely-orchestrated international furor over satirical Mohammed cartoons published in a Danish newspaper, Tehran bakers got also got into the, uh, rechristening act. It turns out that they had also traditionally used a term that translates literally as ``Danish pastry.'' Sweet, flaky danishes were, in fact, a large part of their stock, baked fresh daily. By mid-February, these were being sold as ``roses of the prophet Mohammed.'' The name change was ordered by the confectioners' union on February 16, 2006. (You remember the legend of the origin of the croissant, right? Good.)

The Fannie Farmer Cookbook was apparently behindhand: the 1918 edition did not list French toast, but did have a recipe for German toast. Note that the recipe called for stale bread. One of the Wonders of modern baking, so-called, is that bread comes mushy and ready-to-German-or-French-toast straight from the store. It's the greatest thing since, actually since before, sliced bread. (Yuck.)

The 11th edition of the book (don't ask me ``which book?''), published in 1965, gave a recipe for French toast and not German toast. I haven't checked when the name change took place.

In the US, French toast is mostly a breakfast food. In pre-WWII Germany (Breslau, to be precise) my mother knew this as a lunch food. Cooked slices were served in a stack (like pancakes), with layers of marmalade between the slices. It was called arme Ritter, `poor knight.' The implication was probably that this was the best sort of food an indigent knight could afford. Farmer's specification of stale bread begins to make more sense. It seems like a few delicacies arose from ingenious efforts to make the best of a lean larder. Pizza was originally a stereotypical poor-people's food in southern Italy, so-I-understand. I wonder if the New Orleans version of the submarine or hero or hoagie sandwich, the ``Po' Boy,'' was not originally thought of as a way to use bread to extend a small amount of filling.

My grandmother had a comfortable childhood, and money didn't really become tight until after WWI, and particularly after the Nuremburg laws took away the men's livelihoods, so I always wondered a little where she learned the following trick. When butter starts to go rancid, you can beat it with water. Whip it long and well enough, and the chemicals that are the source of the foul odor apparently dissolve into the water. (Not surprising, since butter is nonpolar, and smelly butyric compounds should prefer the polar solvent of water.) You pour out the water, and the rest of the butter is fit for hungry human consumption.

Let me make some points for the benefit of the punctilious: No, it's not really my idea of ``toast'' either, but the word ``fries'' was evidently taken. ``Toast'' here, as usually, is uncountable. So you might prepare just one slice of French toast, although that would leave a lot of egg batter left over. But that doesn't invalidate the plural ``bread slices soaked...'' in my definition.

(Whatever the origin, at least the French do know this dish. They call it pain perdu.)

In the Francophone town of Madawaska, Maine, just across the St. John River from Quebec, the dish is known as Canadian toast.

I guess if you keep it cool it's more likely to stay fresh, but it's occasionally handy to have distinct words. Conversely, in English ``hot'' means both caliente and picante.

Orientation is the well-scripted routine by which anyone who has gone away to college since about 1925 has probably first experienced American higher education. Historically, it replaced the older, hairier student-to-student initiations of the late nineteenth century: hazing and some of the other colorful customs of the old undergraduate college life.[6] Modern orientation can be seen as a firmly entrenched college custom as well, however--in this case, as a dean's ritual. It is the

The footnote ([6] above) puts a twist on this:

In fact, I discovered during subsequent historical research, the deans' orientation and a cleaned-up version of undergraduate hazing coexisted at Rutgers and at other American colleges for half a century. Hazing suited the deans' purposes admirably: it stitched the students together; it taught them conformity to conservative student ``traditions.'' Only after the undergraduates laughed such practicies out of currency in the late 1960's did the deans discover that hazing was illegal and beneath the dignity of college youths.