H h
Following common practice in thermodynamics, the upper-case letter H represents the extensive quantity (enthalpy) and the lower-case letter h is used to represent one or another intensive quantity (a ``specific'' enthalpy: the enthalpy per particle or unit mass, say, in units of calories per mole or per gram, or whatever else is needed or convenient).
The enthalpy of any homogeneous system of energy E and volume V at pressure p is given by
Enthalpy is a useful quantity to define theoretically, and one that can be measured rather directly in experiments, for processes that occur in constant-pressure environments, if and pretty much only if mechanical work by volume change is the only kind of work performed on or by a system. In this case, the differential of energy can be written (with T and S the temperature and entropy) as
Note therefore that since volume is positive, increasing pressure under adiabatic conditions increases enthalpy. The exact differential for enthalpy yields some obvious identities in the usual way. (In particular, the equality of the two cross-partials is called a Maxwell relation.)
For systems in which other kinds of work W can be done, it is generally possible to represent dW by a sum of products of the form FdQ, where each F is a generalized force and each Q its conjugate (generalized) coordinate or displacement. (It is true that these may refer at the microscopic level to mathematical objects that are not ``real-valued'' in the relevant sense, but thermodynamics is about macroscopic variables, and them's real, so get a life.) One can thus define a generalized enthalpy by adding a product FQ for each force. This isn't a very common practice, but the obvious applications are magnetic and dielectric systems, and elastic systems under some constant nonisotropic stress.
Chemists now represent energy fairly uniformly by E, but physicists often use U. That is a helpful hint that you should be watching out for a different H, the Hamiltonian, described in an entry close below. If you see it, you are in the realm of statistical mechanics, which is basically the concrete microscopic foundation of thermodynamics. Another symbol-table conflict between thermodynamics and statistical mechanics is at p. This is less of a problem because stat. mech. p is the length of a vector p, and vectors have a distinctive font style, but nevertheless it is often convenient to represent pressure in stat. mech. by a capital P. (Just don't mistake it for the magnitude of the dielectric polarization vector, okay?) In statistical mechanics, the thermodynamic quantities one evaluates most directly are free energies. Moreover, constant-volume calculations are usually more convenient than constant-pressure. Hence, enthalpy and Hamiltonian symbols don't bump into each other very much, even though they describe the same physical systems.
What, you want to know more?! Look, it's been a long day. Why don't you see if you can figure something out from the FGR, cumulant expansion, Liouville, and RMT entries?
You could try just saying ``aitch.'' It's different from the names of all the other letters.
Harlan Ellison has observed that the two most abundant things in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity.
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The consensus of sources, once corrected for numerical typos, appears to be
that the Aurelian walls of Rome had a length of 18,837 m (or km, if you
insist on reading the comma European style) and enclosed an area of 1373 ha
(3393 acres).
See also the Hardwood Manufacturers Association (HMA).
Just the other day I was hanging out at Dee'S Donut Shop with my pals on the acronym police. Pops (a veteran on the force since the days of cast-iron punctuation) was lamenting bitterly: ``I can never get over how some people are always getting in trouble when it's really so easy to stay on the right side of the law! Sometimes all it takes is an And or a little rewording. Failure to obey sound acronym construction rules is so rationally inexplicable that it can only be a disease. Somebody ought to study that biobehaviorally.'' The bad guys think they're clever, but nothing gets past the men in pencil blue. ``Information Transfer'' for a newsletter? Who do these people think they're fooling? It's got recherché backronym written all over it.
A completely distinct Spanish hacha, now regional and rare, means `torch.' This word, like the Galician-Portuguese facha or facho, is thought to be derived from a variant form, probably fascula, of the Latin facula, `small torch,' diminutive of fax, `torch.' (It is less probable that the hard cee of facula would have evolved directly into a ch, though there are other possibilities.) The idea is that the -sc- in the presumed fascula would have arisen from confusion of Latin fax with fascis, `bundle,' since torches often consisted of bundles lit together at one end. (A similar conflation, or simply combination of meanings, occurs with the English term for a bundle of twigs or branches normally intended for fuel: faggot.)
That word fascis, in the sense of bundle, has another association with axes. In ancient Rome, the power of punishment was symbolized by a bunch of sticks of uniform length, bundled to form a cylinder surrounding an axe, with part of the blade protruding. Ceremonially, lictors carried these before superior magistrates as symbols of the magistrates' power. (In this context the word usually occurred in the plural, which is fasces in the nominative case.) The symbol was originally used by the Etruscans, and the Latin Romans kept the symbol after they booted their Etruscan rulers.
The Latin word fascis gave rise to the word fascio (plural fasci) in Italian, still in the sense of a bundle of rods or sticks. The fascio was again (but without the axe) adopted as a political symbol in late-nineteenth-century Italy, on the strength of the metaphorical notion that though individual sticks are weak, there is strength in unity. From the symbol, the political groups themselves came to be called fasci. The term was eventually monopolized by the party created by Benito Mussolini during and after WWI. For this rightist party, which drew some authority from the notion that it continued or restored ancient Roman tradition, the association with the ceremonial Fascis of Rome was also valued.
I should probably say something about the word axis, since that word was used by Germany and Italy to describe their political (from 1936) and military alliance (from 1939 and the start of WWII). The idea was that the alliance was a metaphorical common pivot or fulcrum, not that you could connect the two countries by a straight line. Later, Imperial Japan was added to the axis, geometry be damned. It turns out that just as Spanish has two kinds of hacha, with the sense of axe or hatchet prevailing, so English has had two words axe (also spelled ax), the same sense now prevailing. The other sense of ax was of axle or axis, derived from a common Germanic root (cf. modern German Achse) related through Indo-European to Greek áxôn and Latin axis.
(That Erétria was an Ionian colony on the Aegean island of Euboea, near the Attic coast. There is also a nearby modern town of a few thousands by the same name, and another modern Eretria on the Greek mainland, in western Magnesia. The similarity of the name Eretria to that of the country of Eritrea is very probably coincidental. The latter is derived from the Latin name of the body of water it has a coast on: Mare erythraeum, literally `Red Sea.')
But to get back to silver, that English-v/German-b correspondence works reasonably well for noninitial consonants, incidentally. In addition to silver/Silber, one can adduce carve/kerben, cleave/klieben, fever/Feber, give/geben, have/haben, heave/heben, knave/Knabe, live/leben, love/lieben, over/über, seven/sieben, and starve/sterben [follow link for discussion of a semantic shift here], etc.
Typically, this works for cognates going back to proto-Germanic. In many cases one can no longer make the correspondence because a necessary cognate is missing on one side or the other. For example, leave had cognates in High Germanic dialects at least up to 1000 AD (some may yet survive in local dialects), but apparently no straightforward reflex of these survived into Modern German. A cognate verb bleiben (`stay, remain, be left') did survive. This is a contracted (``syncopated'') form of a compound that would otherwise be written beleiben. English had cognates belive and beleave, but they petered out of use in the fifteenth century.
The same correspondence holds for loans from a third language, if they occurred early enough. The only such example above is fever, from the Latin febris.
Sometimes there is only a one-kanji difference, but one is still suspicious. For example, there is a two-kanji word fujin that means `woman, lady.' With a different first kanji that also happens to be pronounced fu, one gets a different word fujin that means `wife.' (The common final element -jin means `person,' as in gaijin.) If the second word fujin corresponded closely in meaning to the English word wife, then a famous punchline would go something like ``that was no fujin, that was my fujin! As it happens, this wouldn't work because fujin only refers to the wife of the speaker or the writer. The wife of the speaker is referred to by a sort of first-person version of the word: kanai. This is not the only instance in Japanese where the choice of noun carries the sort of person information that pronouns and verbs carry in European and Semitic languages. Japanese verbs are not conjugated for person or number, and Japanese personal pronouns are often omitted. (Also, it is perfectly acceptable in Japanese conversation to use one's own name instead of a personal pronoun equivalent to I or me [typically watashi].)
Often you have to suspect neologistic malice. It strikes me as needlessly inconvenient that the word for comet and the name of the planet Mercury are both suisei -- a coincidence because the sui morphemes arise from two unrelated kanji. I suspect that a certain element of mischievous choice is involved. It's hard not to suspect that there isn't some coy significance in the fact that fusai is the pronunciation of totally unrelated words meaning `married couple' and `debt.'
When you go beyond exact homophones to approximate homophones and similar words, the list of suspicious coincidences grows. Shujin, for example, has the meanings of `owner, master [or mistress, as the female form of master], husband.' Don't think too hard about that, but consider that with a different initial kanji one has shûjin, which means `prisoner.'
Founded in Geneva in 1981, HAI's objectives lie on promoting rational use of drugs and ensuring regular availability of quality healthcare and safe and effective essential medicines of good quality to all at affordable prices. With four coordinating offices in Africa, Europe, Latin America and the Asia Pacific, HAI carries out its work through advocacy, research, education, action campaigns and dialogue.''
If HAI is pronounced as ``high'' then it is a homophone of a Hebrew word meaning `life.' (That word is typically transliterated chai, but in European languages different aitch sounds are usually allophones with disjoint distribution.) Hai is also the standard transliteration of a Japanese word that means `yes.' (A lot of the time it really just means `I'm listening' -- sort of like ``yes, dear'' but for use in all social situations.) A more informal version is ihai. And be careful how you answer a question, if the question states a negative proposition.
A HAI is defined in terms of the ``required income to qualify for a conventional loan'' on a home purchased at the median price of houses being sold. The ``conventional loan'' is a 30-year (I think) fixed-rate mortgage with a 20% down payment. The mortgage payment is computed using the ``prevailing mortgage interest rate'' reported by the Federal Housing Finance Board (FHFB) and by HSH Associates of Butler, N.J., for loans closed on existing homes. The ``required income'' is defined as 25% of gross income. The affordability index is defined as the ratio of median income to that ``required income'' for a mortgage on the median-price house. If you prefer, the index is one quarter of the median monthly household income divided by the monthly mortgage payment on a median-price house.
This is a very sensible measure of affordability, but its downfall is that people do not, at least collectively, behave very sensibly. If the median household or future household lived sensibly within its means and only sought a mortgage once it had saved up the 20% down payment, then it would indeed find ownership of a median-price home affordable if the HAI were high. (But rather higher than 1.0, perhaps, if they happen to pay taxes.) Since the savings rate in the US was negative for much of the housing boom, the median household probably did not save the necessary down payment.
One may defend the HAI by saying that, of course, it only measures the affordability of housing for sensible people who save up for a traditional loan. They may have the median income, even if they are not typical. (Hey: the median family doesn't buy a new house every month either!) That might be defending the indefensible, but I would like to go a little further and defend the fool who went ahead and bought a house he wasn't ready to afford, by taking out a nontraditional mortgage. Maybe he was a sensible individual living in an unsensible world.
Our poor fool would have noticed that the down-payment target was moving, and that his savings were not moving as fast as the target. At that rate, he'd never be able to own a home; he'd just be stuck on a treadmill paying increasing rent. Then it came to him: the only way to save up for a home was to make a high-return investment in... real estate! Would the numbers work? Well, he wasn't, like, a math whiz or anything, but the loan officer at the bank seemed eager for his business -- that's not hard to interpret!
HAI Africa actively promotes the concept of essential drugs, their rational and economic use through advocacy, research, education and action campaigns.'' What happened to the ``dialogue'' quoted at HAI?
HAIAP actively promotes the concept of essential drugs, their rational and economic use through advocacy, research, education and action campaigns.'' Gosh, I could swear I read virtually the same words somewhere before.
``Rational'' is a loaded word pointed at pharmaceutical companies, not doctors. ``HAI promotes the rational use of medicines: that all medicines marketed should meet real medical needs; have therapeutic advantages; be acceptably safe and offer value for money.''
HAI Europe is part of something called HAI, but there's no website for HAI, q.v.
Windows error messages:
Homogeneous?
Futility. What
a stupid waste of time, eh?
Pointlessness: Causes.
links, you should have no trouble
finding Perl haiku.
Much more obscure are
the periodic-table
haiku, don't you think?
James R. Hoon: ``Hair of the Dog,'' JAMA, vol. 229, #2, pp. 184-5 (July 8, 1974).
Although both /g/ and /k/ sounds occur in Korean, the distinction is not phonemic. That is, they are allophones. The emic perspective is probably best understood in terms of Hangul, the featural script of Korean -- the standard script. Hangul is written in blocks designed to resemble Chinese Han characters (logographs), but each such syllable block can be analyzed in terms of component characters called jama, which may be deformed somewhat to fit the block. (I could have just called the jama ``letters'' and let it go at that, but I figured I'd make trouble instead.)
The system is called featural because the forms of the jama illustrate schematically (or at least try to) major features in the articulation of the sounds they represent. Thus, the symbol for g/k is shaped like a capital Greek gamma (but facing left) not for sentimental xenophilic reasons, but to represent the shape that the tongue makes, viewed from the side, in the articulation of a velar consonant. An extra line is added to this symbol to indicate aspiration and represent the related affricate /kh/, and a doubled form is used for a tensed or faucal version of the sound.
The velar stop takes voicing by assimilation, and so its sound in hagwon is indeed /g/. There are a variety of different Romanizations of Korean, with varying degrees and domains of acceptance de jure or de facto. Some use g to indicate voicing of the k/g character. Some use g preferentially for the k/g, even in cases where it is unvoiced, in order to save k (possibly with kk) for the other velars. In the latter case, hakwon is the appropriate Romanization.
In the movie, as HAL is being decommissioned by surviving crewman Dave Bowman, it says
I'm afraid. I'm afraid, Dave. Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going. There is no question about it. [Here HAL sounds a bit like George H.W. Bush.] I can feel it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I'm a...fraid. Good afternoon, gentlemen. I am a HAL 9000 computer. I became operational at the H.A.L. plant in Urbana, Illinois on the 12th of January 1992...In Clarke's book, it was a 1997 model. The commemorations were held in 1997. [Clarke came out with a new book, 3001: The Final Odyssey. Cervantes was thinking of just this when he observed ``Nunca segundas partes fueron buenas.'' (Loosely: `Never were sequels any good.') However, as Arthur Clarke himself admits (NYTimes, 1997.04.01, p. B1), he likes attention. If he hadn't moved to Sri Lanka, we might have been spared another best seller, although we also would not have Kubrick's precious remark: ``Arthur Clarke? Isn't he a nut who lives in a tree in India someplace?'']
There's a pentium version of the story as well.
The Halaka language has virtually no productive inflections. Although its phonology suggests a Slavic influence, Halaka is not an Indo-European (IE) language. Thus, the resemblance of its name to the Hindi word halka, (`lightweight') is probably accidental. [Note, however, that the first alphabetic writing system for Sanskrit, believed to have arisen from an Aramaic alphabet, was almost a syllabary, with the default that all consonants were followed by a vowel a : halka --> halaka (a common current pronunciation in the southern, Dravidian-speaking regions of India). Hindi is in the Sanskrit subfamily of IE languages.] There is also no apparent relation with the Hebrew halakha, `the path,' which conventionally refers to the totality of oral and written Jewish law. As the only extant member of its language family (Obnac), Halaka may in fact be called a language isolate.
Today, among an estimated 34 million i speakers worldwide (1990), there is already 85% literacy in the Romanized (i.e., Latin-character-based) orthography. A valuable and comprehensive Halaka <--> English translation dictionary was once available online, but Scott Bordelon apparently decided that the joke was getting old. It took a while for the dictionary to fade from search engine indices. Bordelon also submitted a translation of ``Silent Night, Holy Night'' into Halaka to a site that collects such things. It seems from the text that the grammar, idioms, and semantic fields of corresponding words of Halaka are identical to those of English, except that the word ``the'' is elided in translation. A great convenience, but very hard to rhyme.
I can't take it anymore! I confess! It's lies, all lies! But that translation dictionary was pretty good. I can't remember certainly any more, but I think you could input any English word or nonword and it would spit out an answer. (The same answer for a given input each time.) And the output Halaka words looked wordlike -- no three-consonant clusters, for example. So there must have been some general translation algorithm, but it was hash-like yet constrained.
There, I feel much better now. Please resume your suspension of disbelief.
You know, the path thing is a widespread pretense of religions. Just as in Judaism the law is called the way (halakha), so Christianity has John 14:6 (``I am the way, the truth, and the life''). Path imagery has been popular in Christianity, hence special use of words meaning traveler. (See, for one example, the book Pilgrim's Progress described at the V.F. entry.) Various actual pilgrimages are optional elements of Christian devotion, and in Islam a pilgrimage to Mecca is the obligation of every Muslim who can afford it. The English word Taoism comes from tao or dao, meaning `way,' which stands for the basic, eternal principle of the universe that transcends reality and is the source of being, non-being, and change. That would appear to about cover it. Buddhism has two major schools; the extant one is called Mahayana, Sanskrit for `great vehicle.' Followers of Mahayana dubbed the other school Hinayana, `lesser vehicle.'
Breaking News
It's back! The Halaka-English Global Translator is the index page of <halaka-dict.appspot.com>. Well, actually, it seems to have an entirely different vocabulary and phonology, and now there are inflections and a flag, but to judge from the about page, it's just as real and authentic as before. Gerpun!This translator doesn't attempt to translate nonwords or regular plurals of English, to judge by a few experiments. So basically it just seems to be a pseudorandom mapping gated through a large English wordlist.
I think there might be some tweaking of individual translations. I suppose this is handled by running the map in advance and prestoring -- and tweaking -- the results in a database, but maybe it's done by exception-handling and most Halaka translations are coined for you by an invertible algorithm in real time. Of relevance is the fact that the translator tool is not perfectly invertible. In particular, Halaka na maps to putative English kil, but English kil is left untranslated into Halaka (possibly because it's the proper noun for a Korean car maker).
Useful vocabulary for tourists:
English Halaka Analysis based on roots ------- ------ ----------------------- four ana ... fourteen stapun sta pun: is beer twenty-four klerburtur kler bur tur: how no this forty plamuh pla muh: hello new five staklo sta klo: is of fifteen stedrah ste drah: meet stop twenty-five wagerphleklop wa ger phle klop: big type hotel may fifty muhe ... compute kiloborsti computed shpluklerna handsel stigna Cockney muhklo McDonald klerpla Sahara natur Saharan kiloklewa Jesus shplukler Elvis muhtur visa whie croissant borstipun souffle stagerwhi Lancaster imuhwa Dorchester klopweez Manchester plaphlegnaklah Mancunian splii catalysis muhklahphlekilo catalyses klokilo analysis borpla analyses kletur Thomas English muffin chai eingeleeza gnapla
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Half an odd integer. A physicists' term for the quantum numbers of various angular-momentum-like observables. Obviously, half an even integer is also an integer. The point is to distinguish the numbers that are half-integers but not integers. (These are associated with fermions, q.v.)
There are a number of important angular-momentum-like observables, to be discussed below roughly in order of increasing abstraction. This material is normally covered at various different stages in a physics curriculum, so many readers will find that the going gets unfamiliar or tough rather quickly.
A system with a well-defined angular momentum or algebraically similar observable will have a ``good quantum number'' describing it. The most commonly discussed observables of this kind (with the usual variable designation in parenthesis) are
- orbital angular momentum (L)
- This is the ordinary angular momentum defined analogously
with classical angular momentum in terms of position and
momentum operators. The classical angular momentum vector
L for a rigid body points along the instantaneous axis
of rotation (direction according to right-hand rule). The
rotation degree of freedom is bounded (I mean -- what goes
around comes around) and, more or less as a consequence, the
associated observables are discretely quantized. (I.e.
the quantum-mechanical eigenstates of the operator do not take
a continuum of eigenvalues. In fact, the spectrum (the set of
eigenvalues) has a simple form: the possible eigenvalues of
L2 are L(L+1) in the natural units (aitch-bar
squared), where L is a positive integer. (Please attend this
fact: boldface L here represents a vector. In classical
mechanics, italic L its scalar magnitude. In the same
way, p is ordinary momentum and p is its
magnitude. In going from classical to quantum mechanics, one
takes the vectors p and L into vector operators.
Because it is an observable, it is certainly possible to
discuss its magnitude -- we effectively just did so in the
sentence preceding this parenthetical. However, it is
inconvenient to use L in the classical way, because of
confusion with the quantum number L. (In atomic
physics, it is often written with a lower-case l.)
The vector components of L are noncommuting: rotation about one axis followed by rotation about a different axis is not equivalent to the same operations taken in the reverse order. Noncommuting variables cannot be in simultaneous eigenstates, ... you know, I think I may be losing the people who forgot what they learned in Quantum 101, sorry ... so angular momentum eigenstates are further classified by only a single component, usually chosen as along the z axis. In natural units, the allowed values of this angular momentum component (typically labeled lz or ml) are the integers between -L and +L inclusive (loosely: -L, -L+1, ..., L-1, L). Hence, for an orbital angular-momentum quantum number L, there are 2L+1 states.
This is a good point to return to the idea of ``good'' quantum numbers. Obviously this is a quantum notion, but it is related to symmetry, and symmetry is a more general notion. We say that a system is spherically symmetric if the equations that describe it look the same in any direction. A spherically symmetric mechanical system can rotate in any direction. Nothing can slow or speed such a rotation, since that force would require a description that was not spherically symmetric. (Believe me, this is a lot easier to say with equations than words.) Intuitively, something that rotates faster has more energy. In fact, for simple mechanical systems, [okay, looks like this part wasn't finished]
- intrinsic spin (S)
- This is always well-defined for any elementary particle.
The original proposal of intrinsic spin was made by two
graduate students, Goudsmit and Uhlenbeck, who proposed that
an internal spin variable for the electron would explain some
degeneracy anomalies (i.e., there seemed to be twice
as many single-electron states as one would expect; kinda
important if you want chemistry to work out). In order for
this idea to work, there would have to be only two
intrinsic-spin states. You can see (correctly) using the
formula for orbital angular momentum that 2-fold degeneracy
requires 2 = 2S+1 or S = 1/2. There is
no way to derive a half-integer value from an angular momentum
that generalizes classical angular momentum (as above).
Goudsmit and Uhlenbeck went back to their advisor and said they had second thoughts about their idea and preferred not to publish. He told them it was too late, he'd already sent their manuscript off. In those days, journal reviewers were not so nitpicky either, and the paper went to press. Their advisor (I forget who) consoled them: they were young -- they had the right to publish something crazy. As soon as the paper appeared, H. A. Lorentz pointed out that given the known bounds on the radius of the electron, the proposed value of spin represented an angular momentum so high that the surface of the electron would have to be moving faster than the speed of light (an obvious no-no).
There are other classical-picture objections, and the basic answer to them all today is: spin is an intrinsically quantum-mechanical quantity that happens to share numerous properties (including its general algebraic structure and a proportionality to magnetic moment) with orbital angular momentum, but does not arise from particle motion that has a classical analogue. It is handy to visualize it as the spin of a particle, but strictly speaking elementary particles have no geometric extent and don't spin. (I mean: in the underlying description, elementary particles are points. The real particles they describe, of course, cannot be perfectly localized -- this follows from the uncertainty relations. The picture gets trickier with string theory. String theories are formulated in more than the usual three space dimensions, but the excess dimensions are curled up very tight -- the distance that anything can move in those other directions is preposterously short, and when you move that far, you've just circled back to where you started. Anyway, in these theories fundamental particles are described by strings -- closed loops, in fact. The particles still have at least a codimensionality of three in the higher-dimensional space, so on any human scale it is reasonable to call them point-like.)
There are now many particles (fermions) known with spins (S values) of 3/2, 5/2, and higher. However, so far these are all composite particles or excited states of other lower-mass, more stable particles that have spin 1/2. Spin-S particles have states of well-defined z-component spin (labeled sz or ms) with spin angular momentum values from -S to +S. (I.e., -1/2 and +1/2 for spin-1/2; -3/2, -1/2, +1/2, +3/2 for spin-3/2, etc.) [I ought to talk here about Regge analysis, a great fad around 1960. On second thought: no I shouldn't.] The term half-integer normally modifies spin, which is to say total spin quantum-number rather than a component (``ess-sub-zee''). Therefore, in practice, the half-odd integer it refers to is positive.
- Isospin (I)
- Contracted from the older name for this concept: isotopic
spin. As an aside here, I should mention that isospin, like
angular momentum and all the rest
In outline, the idea behind this is simple: protons and neutrons are particles with similar mass, and since mass is energy, they have the same energy. Now as noted above, rotation symmetries yield finite numbers of degenerate states, corresponding to distinct values of the z component of angular momentum. Introducing a completely inventing a new spin-like algebras yield finite numbers of degenerate The idea had been around even before relativity, that particles are, as we would say now, ``excitations of the vacuum.'' rotational symmetry in three dimensions have
- There's more (intrinsic spin of a collection of particles, total angular momentum, etc.), but that's for another day.
The Latin verb is source of English words like halo and exhale. The Latin noun form halitus (`breath') is used medically and is identified as the basis of the word halitosis. The conversion of the u to o presumably is a feint in the direction of creating a Greek noun, but I'm not buying it: the ending `-sis' is Greek and the root is Latin, so halitosis is a barbarism. I'm sure we all agree.
The trivial nuclear example is deuterium, which can be regarded as a proton nucleus with a neutron halo (D = 2H = 1H + n). This sounds silly on its face: you'd figure that the neutron-proton separation would determine the only sensible definition of what is `inside' the nucleus, so that neither nucleon could be outside of it, on average. However, the rms internucleon distance is an astounding 4.4 fm, so most of the time the nucleons are outside the range of their interaction. Effectively, one should regard halo nuclei as those with some nucleons that spend much of their time more than about a fermi (1 fm) away from any other nucleons. The large average separation is a natural consequence of the just-bound nature of the deuteron. [The scattering-length concept makes this extremely explicit.]
A more intuitive example is 11Li, which looks like 9Li + 2n. [The numbers preceding `Li' should be superscripted. Upgrade your browser or don't complain if they're not. The number in this position next to the chemical symbol for an element represents its atomic mass number A -- the number of nucleons in the nucleus.] The core 9Li has its four protons and five neutrons in a radius of 2.5 fm. The two-neutron cloud in 11Li has a radius of 7 fm.
I think that 11Li marked the ``modern discovery'' of halo nuclei by B. M. Young, et al., reported in Phys. Rev. Lett. vol. 71. Afterwards, it became clear that the surprisingly large branching ratio for E1 decay of 11Be, reported by D. J. Millener, et al. Phys. Rev. C 28, 497 (1983), could be explained simply in terms of a neutron halo.
The key salt in old black-and-white film was silver iodide, and so one film manufacturer in Rochester called itself Haloid. It later became Xerox.
Yes, yes, the city of Halle in Germany got its name from salt mines there.
As is common in many element groups, the lightest element is a bit of an outlier. Hydrofluoric acid, although it is extremely dangerous and corrosive, is not the strong acid that hydrochloric and hydrobromic acids are at the same concentrations.
Sometimes hydrogen is given two locations on the periodic table: its usual place at the beginning (upper left corner) and also the spot just left of helium, which is to say just above fluorine in the column of halogens. This makes an obvious sort of ``electronic'' [atomic-level] sense: there is a single unoccupied state in the highest (and only) occupied level (1s). It also makes a bit of chemical sense, as there are hydrides -- simple compounds in which hydrogen has valence -1 like a halogen. Just don't call it a halogen. (And normally, expect it to have valence +1.)
Halogen lamps are incandescent lamps that use a halogen fill gas, usually iodine or bromine, and (as is essentially universal for incandescent lamps) tungsten filaments. Tungsten atoms evaporated from the filament react with the fill gas to form tungsten halide (i.e., tungsten iodide, tungsten bromide, etc.). This compound does not stick well to glass, but tungsten halide molecules adsorbed on tungsten metal react to deposit tungsten and evolve halogen gas. These facts result in the capture and eventual redeposition of tungsten on the filament. This is called the halogen cycle, and by reducing the effective rate of metal evaporation, it reduces the principal mechanism of lamp aging. (When a halogen lamp is operated at low power, tungsten halide accumulates on the bulb surface. Operation at full power re-evaporates the condensate, clearing the glass and regenerating the filament.)
During operation, the density of the vapor must be high enough to assure that the mean free path of a tungsten atom is much less than the distance between filament and bulb. This can require fill gas that is close to atmospheric pressure. At atmospheric pressure, the boiling point of bromine is 58.8°C, so bromine fill gas condenses as a fluid when the lamp is cold. (The Br melting point is -7.27°C.) Iodine has boiling and melting points of 184.35°C and 113.5°C. In a small quartz lamp I used to have, a thin brownish film and a hardened droplet or two would be left on the inside surface of the lamp after it cooled, and would slowly vaporize as it heated.
(Normally, incandescent bulbs have nitrogen, argon, or a mix as fill gas, at a low pressure that rises to about one atmosphere at normal operating temperature. Lamps of less than 40 watts typically are just evacuated.)
A little point that was elided above is that while tungsten halides do not react and bond to glass, they may simply condense. Hence, halogen lamps must be operated with the interior of the bulb at 500 degrees C or above. (This is just one very good reason to avoid touching a halogen lamp with your bare fingers.) For a long time, halogen lamps used quartz bulbs because quartz glass was the only kind that had the necessary high-temperature strength. (Nowadays there are some alternate glasses in use.)
At the high temperatures reached by quartz bulbs, some skin oils can penetrate and degrade the glass, making it porous, admitting air, and resulting in early failure. Don't let this happen. If you touch the quartz when it is cold, then before turning it on, clean it with a solvent such as lighter fluid. (I love this recommendation. Be sure to dry it off and put anything flammable away before you turn the lamp back on.) If you touch the quartz when it is hot, just scream.
In the preceding paragraph, the word ``around'' is in scare quotes because the Lagrange point is not exactly at the middle of a halo orbit. If one switches to a rotating frame in which the two large-mass objects are stationary, then the halo orbits do periodically go around the axis connecting the two. And if the orbit is tight, then it is close to its corresponding Lagrange point. As the size of the halo orbit increases (as measured, say, by its average radius about the axis in this frame), its average position along the axis changes.
The melting point of tin is 232 °C. This is around the softening temperature of copper (m.p. 1083 °C), but the tinning is done in a quick reel-to-reel process, so the copper is hardly deformed. However, a thin layer of copper-tin intermetallic compound (primarily Cu6Sn5) forms between the metals.
At least by the beginning of the 17th century, ham also referred to the hock of a quadruped. Now, it is obvious from an evolutionary standpoint, and even from any coherent anatomical viewpoint, that the hock of a quadruped like a hog, horse, or dog corresponds to the heel of the human foot. Hence, what is called the ``hamstring'' in these animals corresponds to the Achilles tendon in the human. However, these animals walk essentially on what correspond to the toes of the human foot. (Or on what corresponds to what is left of it. Although the ur-mammals had five digits at the end of each of their four limbs, most mammals today -- excepting primates and elephants -- have fewer. The horse went from three toes to one relatively recently, I think.)
By the middle of the 17th century, ham referred to the thigh of a slaughtered animal, especially cured hog thigh (salted and smoked, or salted and just dried), and that is the most common sense of ham now, of course. ``Ham hocks,'' a feature (or a bug) of soul food, are simply hog hocks.
Ham as a term for an overacting performer or a poor actor generally evidently arose as a short form of hamfatter, from a popular minstrel-show song originally in ``The Ham-fat Man'' (1863). By an association of amateurishness in acting with ``amateur'' in general (and there is the phonetic similarity), the word ham came to be used for ``amateur radio operator.''
I've come across a number of jokes that turn on an English-speaker in a restaurant in France asking for jam and getting ham (jambon in French). This never happened to me. Frankly, when I was in southern France I found that a lot of the restaurant help and shop clerks were Spaniards.
The Spanish word jamón (also meaning `ham') sounds closer to the English because the j was devoiced into an aitch sound half a millennium ago, but the word was obviously (yeah, there's evidence) borrowed from the French. The etymological trail of these j-words disappears back in Vulgar Latin, and it might or might not be related to the English word. And on the subject of vulgar language, Spanish has a slang term jamona that might be translated loosely as `juicy woman.'
One piece of evidence put forward by Stratfordians, though not the strongest, is that William Shakespeare named his son Hamnet (sic). [Stratfordians are those who hold the view that the plays attributed to William Shakespeare were written by the man named William Shakespeare, of Stratford-upon-Avon.]
Hamas was founded in 1987, at the beginning of the first intifada or `uprising' against Israel. Hamas vows never (see jamás) to accept the existence of a Jewish state in the Middle East, and engages in terrorism against Israelis essentially anywhere. It won a majority of seats in the January 2005 elections for the Palestinian Authority parliament.
Similarly, she condemns bracketing case changes. But when I quote her writing ``bracketing such changes looks not punctilious but weird,'' you know that this is only part of a sentence. Had it been the entire sentence my quotation of it should have begun ``[b]racketing such changes....''
She concludes, ``[p]roceed blithely.'' Don't.
You know that count of entries at the thumbtabs page, that stands at about 16000 as of this writing? Well, even stupid entries like this one count toward that number.
Two out of three of us who discussed it at lunch a couple of years ago believed that the elastics on Hanes briefs had gotten weaker in recent years. (That's not a survey but an exact count.)
Here's another interesting thing about that thumbtabs page: we get dozens of visitors to that page every day who were looking for rock music guitar tabs.
nf, not counting compounds like hundertfünf (105).
- A Dictionary of Surnames, published 1988. (Special consultant for Jewish names: David L. Gold.)
- A Dictionary of First Names, published 1990.
Both are very useful books, but it pays to check them where possible, since a few entries, if not demonstrably wrong, can sometimes mislead. See, for examples, the pardo entry (for the Spanish and Portuguese surname Pardo) and the discussion of Hermann towards the end of the SN entry.
For other similar works, see Familienname and Reaney and Wilson.
Naples; Magnificent Albert Sings Pop Songs Clearly Around
Kitchen Cabinets Scandinavian; Titmouse Vindaloo Creates Many Fearful Complaints iN Curious Zones
Li -- Lithium, Be -- Beryllium, B -- Boron, C -- Carbon, N -- Nitrogen, O -- Oxygen, F -- Fluorine, Ne -- Neon;
Na -- Sodium, Mg -- Magnesium, Al -- Aluminum, Si -- Silicon, P -- Phosphorus, S -- Sulfur, Cl -- Chlorine, Ar -- Argon;
K -- Potassium, Ca -- Calcium, Sc -- Scandium, Ti -- Titanium, V -- Vanadium, Cr -- Chromium, Mn -- Manganese, Fe -- Iron, Co -- Cobalt, Ni -- Nickel, Cu -- Copper, Zn -- Zinc).
Excellent sites to learn more: WebElements and Chemicool.
In origin, however, the word (heardlice in Old English) meant `harshly' or `bravely.' That is, it meant `in a hard manner' with an older sense of hard: `bold' or `forceful.' (The modern word hard may be said to preserve the ``passive'' senses of its etymon.) Use of the original sense of the adverb has been in a long-term decline; a more common expression of the idea is ``with difficulty.'' This sense still took pride of place in the hardly entries of Noah Webster's American Dictionary of the English Language (1828) and of Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (G & C. Merriam Co., 1913, edited by Noah Porter).
The `with difficulty' sense of hardly is hardly common at all. In fact, it's not hardly common: it's just plain rare. But it's not unknown, though I'm not sure if it's hardly unknown. Anyway, here's part of a paragraph that uses hardly in two different senses. In the second instance the different senses of the word are almost opposite, and the context is needed to make clear which sense makes sense.
... In the last quarter of the seventeenth century Cartesian science was indeed expounded in some of the colleges of France, and less widely elsewhere, but dissemination of the thought of Galileo, of Bacon, and of the exponents of the mechanical philosophy owed little to university courses. Occasional examples of a university teacher having a decided influence upon a circle of pupils--as was the case with John Wilkins at Wadham College, Oxford, and Isaac Barrow at Trinity, Cambridge--hardly vitiate the general conclusion that the activities of various societies, books, and journals were far more potent vehicles of proselytization, which is supported by many personal biographies. However stimulating the exceptional teacher, formal courses were commonly conservative and pedestrian: it is curious to note that the two greatest scientists of the age who were also professors, Galileo and Newton, seem to hav been singularly unremarkable in their public instruction. If the universities could produce scholars, they were ill-adapted to turning out scientists; the scientist had to train himself. Many who accomplished this transition regarded it, indeed, as a revulsion from the ordinary conception of scholarship. The learning they genuinely prized, in their own scientific disciplines, they had hardly won for themselves. It would surely be absurd to argue that Newton was less a self-made scientist than Huyghens, or Malpighi than Leeuwenhoek, because the former had attended a university and the latter had not.[This is excerpted from pp. 6-7 of Rupert Hall's ``The Scholar and the Craftsman in the Scientific Revolution,'' in Critical Problems in the History of Science, ed. Marshall Clagett (Madison, Milwaukee, and London: Un. of Wisconsin Pr., 1969).]
(There's also a relatively small concentration of dissolved CO3= ion. I actually had a student ask me once what the superscripted equals sign meant. It's a doubled negative sign. I might have written CO32- equivalently.)
Detergent and soap molecules all have basically the same structure: NaR, where R is a long-chain organic molecule. In traditional soap, the long chain is a fatty acid. (Explanation at the saponification entry. Detergent is usually sodium lauryl sulfate, where lauryl- is a twelve-carbon carbon chain extracted from plants, and the sulfate group on the end of the chain bonds to the sodium.
In the presence of nonpolar dirt, the nonpolar end of a soap molecule buries itself in the dirt and the polar Na+ sticks out where it can dissolve in water. In soapy water, microscopic droplets of dirt accumulate a highly polar surface this way, enabling them to dissolve in water and rinse down the drain.
Calcium ion interferes with this process through the following competing reaction:
Ca2+ + 2NaR --> 2Na+ + CaR2 .The causes problems both sterically and through ordinary solubility chemistry:
- Sterically, the carbon chains tend to surround the calcium with nonpolar dirt in such a way that it has less exposure to the water it's supposed to dissolve in.
- In any case, calcium ion is less soluble in water.
Another effect of hard water is to prevent lathering. Lathering is simply the formation of small soap bubbles, and ``soap bubbles'' are really just water bubbles. The role of soap is only to reduce the surface tension of water so the water can form the stable thin-film surface of the bubble. Soap converted by reaction with calcium just doesn't have the same surfactant effect.
Hard water arises because water supplies often come from underground water sources -- aquifers. An extremely common aquifer material is limestone, which consists mostly of calcium carbonate. That's the reason hard water comes not only with high calcium concentration but high carbonate concentration. That carbonate is associated with another hard-water problem: precipitation of calcium carbonate. Nowadays, people notice this first in their teapots: over time, carbonate rings form around the level where the water boils. It's not bad for you and you can't taste it (although you can certainly imagine that you can). It does look bad, though, and many people throw away perfectly good teapots just because they've accumulated an unsightly ring.
DON'T THROW IT AWAY, YOU IDIOT!!!
What you do is, fill the teapot with water above the ring level, and add lemon juice or vinegar or some other acid. (I suppose any cola would do too. Those are acidified by phosphoric acid, but the sour taste of the acid is entirely masked by the sweetness.) Cook it a little bit and the acid will dissolve out the carbonate. Throw out that water now and you have a clean teapot. For a bit more on acid and scale build-up, see the L.I. entry.
The Passover seder is somewhat technically demanding and confusing. A frequent error is confusing haroset with hreyn (Russian name, adopted in Yiddish, for horseradish, ``bitter herbs'').
Now I finally have the appropriate entry for Craig's ``symbolic disputation'' joke. Later.
HARPS ``is dedicated to the discovery of extrasolar planets,'' and it has discovered most of the smallest ones. It first went into operation in February 2003.
Part of the reason for using Harvard architectures is to avoid the endless loops, file corrupts and other dangers that occur when instructions can modify themselves. There is a common notion that the von Neumann machine is somehow more powerful or capable of more general tasks than a Harvard machine. This is not true, since within any Harvard machine it is always possible to simulate a von Neumann machine which uses only the data memory. (Of course, it is also possible to simulate a Harvard architecture within a von Neumann machine.)
This entry is a mess because really, when one is talking Harvard or von Neumann architectures, one is usually discussing abstract machines, Kolmogorov entropy, and all that effete stuff about computability. So really the comments about implementation are otiose. I ought to go back and fix the entry, but I'm lazy.
When (and where) I was in grad school, people going for a Ph.D. in the Computer Science Department were really just doing an oddball sort of abstract mathematics. The joke went that the first time they ever used a computer was to word-process their dissertations. (This was before email.)
In the top tier are old private liberal arts colleges that
- are known nationally although
- they do not have an NCAA division I football team, and
- are known to be ``known as `the Harvard of the South' '' by at least one dozen (12) people outside the South who are not either alumni of that school or their close relatives. (These people believe that this is the only school bearing that epithet.)
Strictly speaking, the first tier comprises only Duke and Vanderbilt, but considering that (a) they don't even have a decent basketball team and (b) my pal Marvin went there, I also include Rice University in the first tier. I further include the University of Virginia, so that if anybody tries to thin the ranks of the first tier, there will be another school that goes before Rice. To be fair, because of Rice's location (Houston) it is less well-known than Vandy (in Nashville, Tennessee) or UVA. If one were to judge by how freely and unapologetically the alumni use the epithet, then Rice would rival Duke. (Nashville, incidentally, is known by its inhabitants as ``the Athens of the South.'' This is discussed at the Athens entry, naturally.)
The University of Virginia, the only public university in the top HotS tier, was Thomas Jefferson's last hurrah. Joseph C. Cabell (1778-1856) was Jefferson's principal strategist and assistant in founding the university. In a letter of January 22, 1820, to J.C. Cabell, Jefferson worried that Virginians educated at Harvard would turn into ``fanatics & tories.''
In the second tier are schools with only a regional HotS reputation: Emory (discussed at the S.P.D. entry) heads this list, followed by Tulane and Ole Miss (University of Mississippi).
Schools of the third tier have a qualified HotS reputation. These are schools about which it is said that ``it is said that some people call it the `Harvard of the South'.'' The epithet is usually deployed ironically or in a way that can be defended as facetious if challenged. This group is rather ill-defined; since virtually no one is willing to claim baldly that one of these schools is the HotS, the entire charade is based on rumors of mis-overheard jokes. Most of these schools have to be identified as Foo College in Bar City, State_Name_Here. Many of the third-tiers are members of the Associated Colleges of the South (ACS), particularly Centre, Millsap, Morehouse, and Sewanee (``University of the South''), and many of the remaining ACS schools qualify marginally (Davidson, Furman, Hendrix, Rollins, Trinity (TX)). Non-ACS third-tier HotS schools are Fisk, Hampton University (Hampton, Va.), Livingstone College of Salisbury, N. Car. (main claim to fame: ``W.E.B. DuBois once referred to Livingstone as the `Harvard of the South' ''), Wofford College (in Spartanburg, South Carolina) and SMU. (Also one McNeese State University -- sports reporting, you know.)
The fourth and lowest tier of schools have bureaucratically mandated HotS ``reputations.'' For example, according to this linked news item, ``UF [University of Florida, Gainesville] administrators have designated the school the `Harvard of the South'.'' I must have missed the announcement. UT Austin has also been called a HotS. Whether this was pursuant to an administrative order I do not know, but (a) I do know that they have tried to buy a reputation by recruiting top scholars (nothing wrong with that) and (b) I have been in Austin, and it does not feel even remotely like Cambridge.
To summarize: one way or another there are two dozen Harvards of the South distributed among the states that seceded to form the Confederacy. Of those eleven states, only Alabama does not claim to have a single HotS. If you enjoy devil-may-care honesty (and I sincerely hope you do) then you'll want to read this 1996 interview of Auburn University history professor J. Wayne Flynt. My man Flynt! He delivers a coruscating jeremiad that includes this:
I think the popular culture in Alabama has a perception of a limited future. In fact, recent polls indicate when Alabamians were asked "what do you envision for your children?" in terms of their future occupations, the single largest category of response was to be in fast food. The level of local support for education is so poor that (the population perceives) there is no future in this community; there is going to be a steady collapse of community to the point where it may be too late. This brings the question can it be collectively too late for a state, and I think the answer is yes.
Then the interviewer had the gonads to ask (reading from a list, I suppose), ``Who is responsible for the success of education in Alabama?'' His answer appears to be cut off, but it begins ``That's sort of like asking who's to blame for the problems.'' I think Neil Young was on to something.
Also deserving of mention: Baylor (at Waco, Texas), the ``Harvard of Southern Baptists.'' The riffs on this idea are endless. Your next stop on the tour of these riffs is the S.P.D. entry.
J. E. Gunn, S. K. Malik, and P. M. Mazumdar: ``Highly Accelerated Temperature and Humidity Stress Test Techniques (HAST),'' 19th Annual Proceedings International Reliability Physics Symposium pp. 48-51 (IEEE, 1981).
Regarding chromosomes: ordinary human cells have 23 pairs of them. Human germ cells, as they used to be called, or gametic cells (sperm and egg cells), are haploid: they have half the usual complement of chromosomes. Cells undergoing mitosis have double the usual complement just before fission, and red blood cells have no nuclei. (Although paired chromosomes are pretty common in the somatic cells of eukaryotes, there are various organisms which exhibit haploidiploidy: males develop from unfertilized eggs and have haploid somatic cells. You think that's weird, just be glad I don't define haploidization. Haploidiploidy happens with honeybees, but not with chickens. So the egg you had for breakfast was never going to hatch into a bird, since it wasn't fertilized.)
There are a number of genetic abnormalities in humans that involve unusual numbers of chromosomes (``aneuploidy''), and a few of these are not immediately fatal. The best known is Down syndrome (an extra copy, ``trisomy,'' of chromosome 21), which modern treatment has made quite survivable. (Strictly speaking, this only accounts for about 95% of Down cases. In the translocation type of Down syndrome, extra chromosome-21 genes are inherited via DNA that has translocated onto another chromosome.)
A number of aneuploidies involve the sex chromosomes. This page lists a bunch.
Read it here now. Eventually I'll scatter this stuff to more appropriate entries.
. Thus, a
hat size of 7 corresponds very closely to a head circumference of 22 inches.
The Mickey Mouse ears atop the "Earffel Tower" (a water tower in the Disney-MGM Studios addition to Walt Disney World, created by Caldwell Tanks, Inc.) correspond to a hat size of 342 3/8!
``Hat size'' is also a ready euphemism for intelligence. (E.g., ``they don't publish chemistry textbooks in your hat size.'')
Amsterdam Hauptbahnhof is `Amsterdam Central' (Amsterdam Centraal in Dutch). In June 2005 I was able to google a grand total of three instances of Penn Hauptbahnhof, all serving as translations to German of `Penn Central Station.' Journalists, sensibly, generally avoid attempting a direct translation. Penn Central Station was the name given in various cities to the train station where the old Penn Central Railroad stopped.
The headword of an entry, in general, is das Stichwort. Der Stich is a cognate of `the stitch,' but is used for a wide variety of related penetrations -- `stab, dig, sting, pinprick.' You can think of Stichwort as `incised word.' German also has die Rubrik, and `unter der Rubrik ...' does still mean `under the rubric [of] ...,' but the word's meaning has drifted more decisively in German than in English, and now Rubrik itself primarily means `category' (figurative sense of rubric) and `[newspaper] column.' You could use s.v.
A headword, in the technical linguistic sense of a word that may be modified by an adjunct, is simply called a Nukleus in German.
The HAV nots are better off, and it is not good to give or to receive.
One mandate of HAVA was that every polling place have at least one handicapped-accessible voting machine by January 1, 2006. As of 2008, there are plenty of jurisdictions that are not in compliance, and the US DoJ has taken sued some states to court.
HAVE A NICE DAY
END OF TRANSACTION.
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There was a popular BBC program (or programme, anyway) on the English language, and I think it was in a companion paperback called The Story of the English Language or something that I read the claim that the use of ``have got to'' began in Britain and was brought back to the US by American soldiers after one or another World War. This turns out to be at least partly incorrect.
The hypothesis of a British origin has the following plausibility: one might expect a verb following have in a compound construction to be in the past participle form. The past participle form gotten is preserved in American English, while got is used (as both past and past participle) in British English. Hence, ``have got'' in the sense of ``have received'' is common in Britain and rare in the US. Then again, ``I've got'' in the loose but common sense of ``have'' is common in the US, so this isn't very strong evidence.
In fact, however, the have-got-to idiom was in common use in the US at least as early as shortly after the Civil War, while it was apparently not in common use in Britain as late as 1909. My evidence for both claims (weak for the second) is in Sir William Butler: An Autobiography, which Lieut.-General the Rt. Hon. Sir W. F. Butler, G.C.B. wrote in the year before he died on June 7, 1910. The times he spent in North America included a period in 1866 when he joined the buffalo hunt in the Nebraska Territory. He describes this toward the end of chapter 6, and digresses thus:
What impressed me most strangely about the men I now came in contact with was the uniformity of the type which America was producing--northern, southern, eastern, western, miner, hotel-keeper, steamboat-man, railroad-man, soldier, officer, general,--the mould was the same. `There has got to be' seemed to be the favourite formula of speech among them all, whether it was the setting up of a saloon, the bridging of a river, or the creation of a new State. `There has got to be' this railway, this drinking bar, this city, this State of the Union. Nobody dreamt, except when he slept; everybody acted while he was awake. They drank a good deal, but you seldom saw a man drunk, and you never saw anybody dead drunk. They sometimes shot each other, they never abused each other; they were generous, open-hearted, full of a dry humour, as manly as men could be; rough, but not rude; civil, but never servile; proud of their country and boastful of it and of themselves. That day and evening, and all the other days and evenings I spent at Fort Kearney, were the same--good fellowship, good stories round the festive board at night, hard riding and hunting all day over the glorious prairies.
It's probably worth noting that there is a certain celebratory tone in much of Butler's writing (particularly in his biography of General Napier), but he is not uniformly laudatory. The business about story-telling reminds me of some observations Gertrude Stein had in Wars I Have Seen (pp. 248-9). This is also an autobiography, like pretty much all of her books, and it was written after the liberation of France, and so also in the year or two before she died.
Gradually as the joy and excitement of really having Americans here really have them here began to settle a little I began to realise that Americans converse much more than they did, American men in those other days, the days before these days did not converse. How well I remember in the last war seeing four or five of them at a table in a hotel and one man would sort of drone along monologuing about what he had or had not done and the others solemnly and quietly eating and drinking and never saying a word. And seeing the soldiers stand at a corner or be seated somewhere and there they were and minutes hours passed and they never said a word, and then one would get up and leave and the others got up and left and that was that. No this army was not like that, this army conversed, it talked it listened, and each one of them had something to say no this army was not like that army. People do not change, no they don't, when I was in America after almost thirty years of absence they asked me if I did not find Americans changed and I said no what could they change to except to be Americans and anyway I could have gone to school with any of them they were just like the ones I went to school with and now they are still Americans but they can converse and they are interesting when they talk. The older Americans always told stories that was about all there was to their talking but these don't tell stories they converse and what they say is interesting and what they hear interests them and that does make them different not really different God bless them but just the same they are not quite the same.
For more on Stein on Americans telling stories in France, and an indication of how all her books are autobiographies, sometimes in two different senses, see the S.O.S. entry. The issue of American cultural homogeneity is touched upon at the 5-2 defense entry, in a quote from Everybody's Autobiography (by and about Gertie, of course).
William Butler's use of the word mold is reminiscent of ``the melting-pot'' metaphor of America, popularized by Israel Zangwill's play of that name. (In Act I: ``A fig for your feuds and vendettas! Germans and Frenchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and Russians--into the Crucible with you all! God is making the American.'') Zangwill's play was the hit of 1908, the year before Butler wrote. (The metaphor was used by others, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, in earlier but much less well-known instances.)
The Chemical Transportation Emergency Center (ChemTREC) emergency number is 1-800-424-9300.
See the Hgb entry for a thought on the construction of this abbreviation.
The Commonwealth spelling of (Amer.) hemoglobin is haemoglobin.
The state of Bremen comprises two urban areas -- Bremen and its seaport city Bremerhaven. (The aitch might refer to Haven, `port' or to Bremen's history as a Hanseatic city; I don't know. The German word for port is Hafen, which would be pronounced the same if it were spelled Haven, and which is of course a cognate of the English word haven. Bremerhaven was founded very recently by European standards -- 1827, but spelling evolves.)
Bremerhaven is on the North Sea coast, Bremen is thirty-plus kilometers up the Weser River. All the land borders of the two cities are with the surrounding state of Lower Saxony (NI).
All together Bremen is the smallest Land, both in terms of area (404 sq. km.) and population (660,000 in the national census of 1987; 677,800 in the a local census for Dec. 31. 1996). Bremen was part of the old West Germany, and is Germany's second largest port after Hamburg (see HH).
In the same book he also explains that when pencils as we know them were first invented, they used unprocessed, natural graphite -- and the only known source of this with decent quality was a single mine at Borrowdale, near Keswick, England. This monopoly lasted for over 100 years.
I recommend using an alphabetic character from Maltese (U+0127; the letter name is ħe). Barring that, if you'll pardon the expression, there are other alphabetic characters. The version of Cyrillic alphabet used in Serbian has a small letter tshe (U+045B) that is similar. Both of these symbols have the form of a lower-case Roman letter aitch with horizontal bar through the upper half of the letter, and both are widely available in italic variants. When italicized, both would pass for ordinary hbar glyphs but for the fact that bar in hbar is a slanted stroke (upper right to lower left). Another option is Ogham letter ruis. This is less similar and less common, which is just as well: it's supposed to be at U+168F, and apparently is there on Mac fonts, but the Microsoft fonts I've checked have a grave-accented W there. Another approach is to use strike-through, but that generally puts a horizontal bar below the middle of the character line, so it looks pretty bad. Here are the approaches described:
- ℏ: ℏ
- <i>ħ</i>: ħ
- <i>ћ</i>: ћ
- <i>ᚏ</i>: ᚏ
- <i><del>h</del></i>:
h
(I use <del> because <strike> and <s> are deprecated.)
Another approach is to create the page in LaTeX (where one has \hbar) and use one of the standard conversions that generates gifs for all the formulae.
Vide AC.
``Please be aware that our mailings are scheduled well in advance. Although your name will be removed from our list immediately, there may be one more solicitation which is already on its way to you.'' [In microelectronic hardware, this sort of practice is called vectorization or pipelining.]
Morehead and Spellman, in Atlanta, are two HBCU's that are part of the Associated Colleges of the South. There's some history of Dillard University, an HBCU in New Orleans, at this AMA entry.
Ohhh -- I get it. It's the hard-to-get gambit, not-sentimental variation.
There ought to be an episode where Robin says ``Holy Bible, Batman!'' The defect of having an abbreviation HBRV is that it's bound to be misconstrued as standing for ``HeBRew Version'' sometimes.
This page is about HBT's on Silicon (Si).
``Centers.'' I'm sure there was a very good reason to use this word.
In 1992, the Greenville (S. Car.) Department of Social Services sent a termination notice to a former beneficiary. This stated in part:
Your food stamps will be stopped effective March, 1992, because we received notice that you passed away. May God bless you. You may reapply if there is a change in your circumstances.Reportedly, the ``May God bless you'' was inserted at the keyboard by a sympathetic civil servant. I don't believe this answers all reasonable questions that might occur, however.
Under proposed welfare reforms now being considered in the House of Representatives under the Republican regime, the letter would have read ``Your food stamps have been stopped effective March, 1991, because we figure you'll be dead soon anyway. May the Market have mercy on your estate. If there is a change in your circumstances, we'll call you.''
Under terms of the 1988 Democratic Party platform (by all accounts, year of the last admittedly liberal US presidential campaign), the letter would have read ``Your food stamp allocation will be increased effective March, 1993, because you haven't been eating well. May a superior rational being, if you choose to acknowledge one, empower you emotionally. If you have any material desires, please allow us to fulfil them.''
The strongest acid that any ancient civilization knew about was acetic acid -- the chemical which, as its name suggests, makes vinegar sour. (Follow the link for etymological details.) Acetic acid is not a strong acid. Over the course of centuries, mineral acids were eventually made and discovered. In 1824, the English physician William Prout demonstrated that the gastric juices of animals contain hydrochloric acid. (So much effort, and all that time the alchemists were carrying around little sacs of acid at the ends of their esophagi.) Prout's contemporaries were incredulous.
Hydrochloric acid was at the center of some confusion at the beginning of the nineteenth century. For details, see the remarks under oxygen in the technical misnomenclature entry.
No material including images and text shall be reproduced without
the explicit consent of the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office.''
Please visit.
``The Internet Doctor'' provides excellent (i.e. egregious) examples of its use, demonstrating en passant the inappropriate rigidity respecting numbers, the misspelling, and the credulity that are special charms of the information-like ASCII sequences found on the web. On the bright side, this page of advice is probably broadly correct, and does take the trouble to give incorrectly named quantites their correct units.
In order to allow rapid characterization (temperature increase between 1.8 and 2.2 °C per min.), the fiber is immersed in an inert liquid medium such as mineral oil. The buoyancy of the fiber in liquid is a negligible effect.
The technical problems in transmission and display are formidable, but some Japanese receivers, and some program transmission, were already in operation in Japan in 1990. At about that time in the US, the FCC put out a call for participation, to define the encoding and transmission schemes that it would make standard for the US. In the competition (to see whose idea the FCC would essentially adopt whole as the standard--as happened with NTSC), it became clear that the way to go was to have digital signal encoding, with substantial compression of the transmitted signal, often with only an image-modification signal sent. SECAM (the French color TV system) has been using storage of a full screen of data for years on traditional resolution, so by now the approach of storing and updating is not a significant technical hurdle (vide VRAM).
First detected as a line in the solar spectrum, hence the name. The Latin -ium ending was used -- instead of the Greek ending -on of the other noble gases -- because it was not known to be a noble gas when it was discovered and named.
The isotopes with one and two neutrons were once called He I and He II, respectively. They have rather different low temperature properties, essentially because He I is a composite fermion and He II is a composite boson.
Learn more at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool, where it was #5 on the Top Five List last time I checked (long ago).
The proceedings of the International Conference on the Science of Superconductivity, Hamilton, New York (1963), were published in Rev. Mod. Phys. vol. 36 (1964). One of the interesting articles there is K. Mendelssohn's ``Prewar Work on Superconductivity as Seen from Oxford,'' (pp. 7-12). He writes:
... Nowadays, it is not generally appreciated that one of the main reasons for making ... miniature liquifiers was the scarcity of helium gas, which had to be extracted laboriously from Monazite sand. The arrival of the first American helium from gas wells was an important event, and I went down to the Berlin Customs House to open the crate. But then the official wanted to open the cylinder too, to see whether it contained liquor. He only relented when I assured him that I should be most disappointed if it did.
As I was leaving the library after reading Keesom's paper [W. H. Keesom and J. N. van den Ende, Comm. Phys. Lab. Univ. Leiden, no. 219b (1932)], I had to duck a few bullets which were flying through the streets of Breslau, heralding the approach of Nazi rule, and it became clear that the cooling experiment would have to be deferred a little.
... I say `nearly all' laboratories, because the Russian colleagues who had signified their intention to attend failed to turn up. We were given the glib explanation that they were too busy to attend meetings. I was particularly disappointed because Shubnikov's group in Kharkov was carrying out work [L. V. Shubnikov, V. I. Khotkerich, J. D. Shepelev, and J. N. Rjabinin, Physik. ZS. Sowjet Union, Suppl., p. 39 (1936)] very similar to ours, but communications had been limited to exchanges of reprints with greetings scribbled on them. As it happened, Shubnikov was arrested shortly afterwards on charges from which he was to be posthumously exonerated twenty years later.
The state's area is 21,114 sq. km. Its population was 5,508,000 by the census of 1987, estimated at 6,031,000 for 1997. Hessen was part of the old West Germany; its capital city is Wiesbaden. Before the Federal Republic, Darmstadt was the capital of the state. IIRC, the Electrical Engineering and Physics Departments at UB have student exchange programs, each with a University in one of these two Hessian cities.
Hessen is one of those German proper nouns that used to have a slightly different form in English (Hesse), but whose German name is slowly being accepted as the standard English name. The best example of the phenomenon is the German name Frankfurt, which has almost completely displaced the older English equivalent Frankfort, q.v. As it happens, Frankfurt am Main is in Hessen State, 17 miles north of the smaller city of Darmstadt.
Hesse, of course furnished the largest group of mercenaries for the British effort against its rebellious North American colonies late in the eighteenth century, and German mercenaries generally came to be known as Hessians. A fly whose appearance was first noted at the time of the Revolutionary War came to be known as the Hessian fly in the US, and the American fly in Hesse.
During the Revolutionary War, Continental and state militia forces combined totalled about 20,000 troops, while British forces numbered about 42,000 regulars plus about 30,000 German mercenaries. US forces lost most of the major battles they fought, controlled none of the major cities, suffered disunity, mutinies, treasons, incompetent generals, bad cash flow and military supply problems and worthless government scrip. The British had some problems too, and they lost the war. What's this information doing here in the Hesse entry? Oh well.
- you have the volume turned up so high that the empty glass in front of you vibrates across the table, as you destroy your hearing ... requiring you to turn the volume up still higher;
- you tap and clap in approximate time to the music, and sing and hum along, so people wish they had the real music to drown out your library karaoke.
- Originally: something (instrument) that adorns the head.
- Colloquially: something that adorns the inside of the head.
In the movie Sleeper, Woody Allen's character is the manager of a health food store who is accidentally put into suspended animation when a routine dental procedure goes awry, and defrosted by political dissidents in a totalitarian future. His reaction on sampling a particularly distasteful dish is to remark that it would have sold well in his health food store. (He is also offered unfiltered cigarettes as an effective tranquilizer by his physician hosts, who lament that in his day the healthful properties of double fudge and juicy steak had not yet been recognized.)
The June 1998 Atlantic Monthly has a story on how butter is no worse for you than margerine, and how it tastes great and is lined up to be the next olive-oil-style healthy gourmet food.
NASA's HEAO 2 was renamed the Einstein Observatory after making it into orbit. Good move.
#3 seems to have been the underachiever in the family.
Hey! Great news! The soda machine doesn't give those stupid dollar coins any more!The older guy replied:
Yeah, they confirmed it!
He referred, of course, to the reported capture of former Iraqi dictator Sodam Achine.
My accent is also mentioned at the adult education entry. There's another entry that describes a pattern-recognition failure using the sense of sight, but you'll never guess what entry I stuck the story into.
In microelectronics, heavy metals are period-four and -six transition metals that are troublesome contaminants because of their electrical properties. Au (see Gold) and Pt are lifetime killers in Si. Fe, Cu, Ni, and Cr, in period IV, have atomic weights in the range 51 to 63, or about twice that of Si. They're at the top of the famous curve of (nuclear) binding energy, so they're rather common.
Because the conventional definitions of heavy metals include only transition metals, they exclude, amusingly, barium (Ba), whose name means heavy.
Heavy metal is a broad category of rock music characterized by electric-guitar amplifier distortion in the lots-to-huge range. Lyrics are often deemphasized but never absent. If they took out the lyrics, it would be a new kind of music that might be called Doo-Wop Scream. Some scattered other thoughts on heavy metal at the E.T.I. entry.
It was for an election of student representatives in junior high school that I first used one of those those walk-in gray, steel-construction voting booths. You know which ones I mean -- those curtained half-booths with flip levers that click clearly and a big red-handled lever that gives a solid ka-chunk as it registers your vote and pulls the curtain. If you're not strong enough to pull the lever, you've got no business voting. I loved those things. The popular model came out in 1960, based on a design originally by Thomas Edison. I've used a half a dozen different kinds of voting machine in the years since, and it's never felt as good. No wonder voter turn-out has declined: there's nothing to look forward to any more. Bring back the heavy-metal voting machines!
If you like to think in exotic terms, and when you consider that water is quite polar, you can think of a heavy-water molecule as two deuterons bonded to an O= ion.
HECS was introduced in 1989. Until then, Australian students paid no tuition fees. John Dawkins, Minister of Education in the Labour government at the time, argued that this constituted an unfair subsidy to the better-off families that sent students to college. Under HECS, each student is assessed a tuition obligation (initially it was AUD 1800 per year of study), and they have the choice of paying immediately or deferring payment. If payment was deferred, no interest is ever charged, although the obligation is indexed to consumer prices. (Actually, there is an effective charge for accepting the loan, because students who pay immediately receive a discount, but most students choose to defer.)
Repayment of the loan is keyed to income, and in fact functions as a kind of income-tax surcharge. Starting after the end of their period of studies, students are required to repay in amounts (called ``deferred contributions'' to the higher education system) that depended on how much their income exceeds a threshold of the average industrial wage (about AUD 30,000 in 1989). Contributions would be collected until the loan was repaid or 25 years had passed, whichever came sooner.
Now, to tell you the truth, I don't give a rat's ass about Australian Soccer. Nothing personal: it's just that I'm an American, and Americans don't care about soccer. It's not unconstitutional for an American to care about soccer -- it's not even illegal in most states. It is merely impossible. I'm not sure whether it's a logical impossibility or a biological one, but it can't happen. (I did find the NSL administrative shenanigans exciting, though.) Yet you know that I wouldn't drag you this far through a glossary entry just because a Macedonian Greek soccer club in Australia is called Heidelberg United. (Alexander was in Fitzroy before it moved to Heidelberg.) That's why you're still reading. (Hello?!) There's got to be more entertainment value in it than that, and there is. So keep the faith, and read on.
Since it was dumped by the NSL, Heidelberg has played in the Victorian Soccer Federation. It won the Victorian Premier League championship in 2001, but the next year it fell to last place in the VPL and was booted down to the State League's first division. I don't know what that is, but in everything I've read so far (including the team's own sugarcoated history), the sentence that mentions State League 1 always contains the word ``relegated.'' Anyway, under current (2004) president Elias Deliyannis, the team has signed a number of former NSL players. It's pushing to win the State 1 championship in 2004 and bid for promotion back to the VPL for 2004/2005. (We actually have another VPL entry.) But it's been hard to find sponsorship. Deliyannis heard that Gotham City, a local business, had backed motor racing and netball in the past. (They've also supported kickboxing.) He approached the owner, who committed to a ``corporate sponsorship package'' of about $20,000. Gotham City is a South Melbourne ``institution'' (that euphemism comes up a lot) which promotes itself as Australia's only ``six-star brothel.'' This institution charges ``$240 an hour and an additional $30 for fantasies.'' (All amounts in Australian dollars.) Reporter Peter Desira broke the story.
Now you shouldn't worry that young children will be exposed to anything their parents wouldn't want them to see. ``There definitely won't be signs at the ground or on our shirts,'' according to Deliyannis. He understands that ``this has to be dealt with in a sensitive way.'' So what's in it for Gotham? Well, ``the owner believes he will get value by word of mouth...'' (my italics). Is that what Delyannis meant by saying that they were ``endeavouring to expose their business in a tasteful way''? This ``sensitive'' business can get pretty sticky. Wording is subject to alternative interpretations. ``It's a straight-out cash deal. There are no additional services offered, or asked for.'' Mm-hmm. The team website expresses great pleasure at all the attention. In an emailed announcement of the deal, the team urged fans to ``support the girls who support us.'' Athletic supporters, sure.
I really want to write about the NSL corporate gamesmanship that happened in 1995, but I haven't sorted it out yet. So instead, I'll explain that Elias is one of those names with a different form in the vocative. So if you're talking about Elias, that's what you call him, but if you're talking to him, it's Elia. Also, Delyannis looks like a Cypriot name (because of the -is) rather than a mainland name, but you never know.
As long ago as 1997, a children's book was published with the title Duh - Heir Head: And Other Stories That Are Even Dumber than Dumb and Dumber, by Allen B. Ury. According to the publisher, it's ``packed with the air-headed action of a brainless gang of geeks, all the stories in this dud-namic new series serve up stupid in a very smart way. Characters bungle their way from story to story in this stupendous series, creating havoc and fun for midgrade readers--even the quick-witted ones.'' No, I don't understand where the pun comes in.
In metaphorical senses related to money (price freezes, freezing of assets, etc.), the usual verb is congelar.
Before the discussion to follow it should be stressed that when helar and its inflected forms are used nonmetaphorically as verbs, some solidification is usually implied. Thus, for example, ``esta noche helará,'' `tonight there will be frost' (not just cold). When fruit or plants are said to helar they have not just been chilled but gone hard. The only standard exception I can think of is in describing a person as freezing (i.e., suffering extreme cold), which may be considered either dramatic hyperbole or else a way to avoid some of the transferred senses of enfriar (`to cool, to make cold'). (Here one really must use the reflexive enfriarse, `to become cool, to get cold.' You probably also want to know that resfriarse is `to catch cold.')
The word for ice, hielo, is more evidently and straightforwardly related to helar than to congelar. (Helar is a stem-changing verb -- see hielo for details -- so the e/ie distinction is ignorable.) Perhaps that is why English terms related to ice (rather than freeze) seem preferentially to correspond to helar words. For example, helado, literally `iced,' means `ice cream.' (This is closer than it looks now; the original English term was iced cream.) Likewise, heladera is `refrigerator,' the technological descendant of an ``ice box.'' A congelador is a `freezer.' And heladera also means `ice cream woman.' (One who sells or makes it, not is it.)
A different word altogether, and not very common now, is helear, `to make bitter.' It's from hiel (`bile'), q.v.
Peter M. Green's widely praised book about the Hellenistic era is entitled From Alexander to Actium. Actium, now called Akri, is a promontory on the coast of western Greece. A naval battle took place there on September 2, 31 BCE, in which the fleet of Octavius Caesar, commanded by Marcus Agrippa, defeated the combined fleets of Mark Antony (Marcus Antonius) and Cleopatra (Kleopatra VII). The lovebirds flew to Egypt. The next year Octavius pursued them there, and the city of Alexandria surrendered without a fight. Mark Antony and Cleopatra committed suicide. Cleopatra's death marked the end of her (Ptolemaic) dynasty, and Rome annexed Egypt. (Although that was the end of the Ptolemaic dynasty, it wasn't the end of people named Ptolemaeus. The most famous such was the Alexandrian astronomer and cartographer Ptolemy, who flourished in the second century CE.)
The ``Hellenistic Age,'' by that or a similar name, is one of the more useful periodizations. After Alexander died, his generals competed for the pieces of the empire he had carved out of the western Asia and Egypt, and politically the region settled into a pattern that persisted until Rome's expansion overran it. Culturally, the period was marked by a diffusion of the Greek language, and Greek (Hellenic, as distinguished from Hellenistic) ideas and culture.
Aristotle died in 322 BCE, so the Hellenistic era begins with the end of the golden age of Greek philosophers. Although the Greek city-states declined precipitously in political importance, however, Athens maintained its preeminence as a center for philosophy.
There's a HELLP Syndrome Society, Inc.
Here are some purported reports from the field.
- When you've got the nut in the nutcracker, hold it inside a bag (a transparent bag with the unshelled nuts will do) to crack it, so the broken bits of shell don't fly all over the room.
- Don't just test your smoke alarm. If it doesn't work, replace the batteries.
That's enough for now. When you've memorized the list, you can come back and we'll have more hints.
- What, back already? Alright: if it smells bad and isn't cheese, throw it away. You save money in the long run.
- Remember that nut thing you memorized? Of course you do! Do that when clipping your toenails, too. But use a nail clipper instead of a nutcracker, and use a different bag.
Competently constructed clothing has hems; the bottom hem of a skirt is called a hemline. Until he was six, Ernest's mother Grace dressed him in girl's clothes. There is endless speculation on the effect. We literati are bored by it all. Heck, I don't mention it but two or three times in this glossary. (The other place I can find right now is this bit.)
A semibreve is a whole note. Wonders never cease.
Other equivalent names: MODFET (less common), TEGFET (rare), and 2DEGFET (not completely unknown).
The laser has a nice green line at 543.5 nm.
According to a July 2012 article in the Weekly Standard, ``Henrys run households with annual incomes between $100,000 and $250,000. There are about 21 million of them. Henrys make up the overwhelming majority of affluent consumers, who account for 40 percent of consumer spending--which in turn is 70 percent of economic activity.''
(I'm not endorsing these claims, just passing them along.)
More useful information can be found at the Hepatitis Information Network.
Although nonviral hepatitis occurs (bacterial hepatitis, hepatomas, and food poisoning that may be referred to as nonviral hepatitis), in current usage the unqualified term hepatitis usually refers to a viral liver disease, of which six (A, B, C, D, E and G) are common. (The corresponding viruses are typically called HAV, HBV, etc.; a namespace collision looms -- cf. HIV.) Viral diseases generally do not (except indirectly) respond to antibiotics.
- Hepatitis A, or infectious hepatitis, caused by an RNA virus. Transmitted in food and water. A vaccine exists.
- Hepatitis B, or serum hepatitis. A DNA virus primarily transmitted in blood transfusions, although transmission via other bodily fluids occurs. Generally more acute than A. A vaccine exists.
- Hepatitis C. Originally called non-A, non-B hepatitis, when
screening for A and B (starting in the 70's) in blood supplies failed
to eliminate all cases of hepatitis linked to blood transfusion.
There are many varieties of these RNA viruses, and some of the
variability in disease progression and responsiveness to treatment
(mostly alpha interferons, right now) seems to be associated with this.
The variability also makes the development of immunity or of a vaccine
more difficult (no vaccine exists at the time this entry is written).
A majority of patients with acute hepatitis C develop chronic HCV
infection.
Here is a consensus statement on the management of Hepatitis C from the NIH.
It is estimated that as much as 2% of the US population is infected with the virus -- of which number very few are aware of their positive status.
According to R. Andrew Nickson's Historical Dictionary of Paraguay (Metuchen, N.J. & London: Scarecrow Pr. Inc., 2/e 1993), his years were 1560 to 1643, and he was governor of Paraguay three times: 1592-1599, 1602-1609, and 1615-1621. He was the son of Governor Martín Suarez de Toledo. [The current system of Spanish surnames did not become common until the mid-1700's. Arias was probably named after his mother or less probably a grandparent. The ``de Saavedra'' bit could be geographic or genealogical.]
According to Ione S. Wright and Lisa M. Nekhom's Historical Dictionary of Argentina (Scarecrow, 1978), his years were 1561 to 1634, and he was born in Asunción of Spanish parents. He was appointed lieutenant governor in Asunción in 1592, and then served three times as governor of the Río de la Plata area: 1597-1598, 1602-1609, 1614-1620.
According to the EUI, he was born in Asunción and was the first creole to hold [high] public office in [Spanish] America. He was governor of Argentina in 1591. The EUI doesn't give other dates, but says he governed the extensive province of the Plata for many years. It also explains that initially, his merits were not recognized by the Spanish court, and this caused him to be passed over in favor of Diego Marín Negrón (of whom I can find no other mention), but that Arias was allowed to succeed him on his death.
English has a word heroine that is currently pronounced identically with heroin in the major dialects. As it happens, Japanese has borrowed that word also. (Given the possibilities, it seems clear from the Japanese pronunciations that both words were borrowed from English rather than another language.) However, rather than borrow the same pronunciation, the Japanese simply adjusted the pronunciation of the word for hero that was also borrowed from English and written hirô. Hence, the English homophones heroin and heroine correspond to the Japanese heterophones heroin and hiroin, respectively.
I should add that Japanese is generally very tolerant of homophones. It is true that in most cases, native homophones are not homographs -- they are distinguishable in writing because they typically contain at least one different kanji. When words started to be borrowed from European languages, they originally had two written forms. One was a ``phonetic'' representation (which linguists prefer to call ``phonemic'') using the katakana syllabary; the other form, using kanji, was constructed in the manner of new native coinages. Eventually, the Japanese stopped constructing kanji versions and used katakana exclusively for new foreign (i.e., European-language, and eventually mostly English) loans. Homophones in foreign borrowings, therefore, are indistinguishable (are homographs), unlike native homophones. Nevertheless, I don't discern any great effort to avoid homophony. In fact, this entry was only constructed to support the entry for the Japanese suchîro, which represents a Japanese homophone pair borrowed from an English homophone pair.
[ (s - a) × (s - b) × (s - c) × s ]½ ,
where s is the semiperimeter (a + b + c)/2, and in case it's not clear, the quantity in square brackets is being raised to the one half power -- square-rooted.
The Latin word herpes is derived from the
Greek epsilon-rho-pi-eta-sigma [in beta code: e(/rphs, genitive
e(/rphtos masc.] and originally referred only to herpes zoster (vide infra). The Greek
term occurs at least twice in the Corpus Hippocraticum, viz. in the
Prorrheticum (2.11) and in the fun-to-read Aphorisms (5.22). It is derived
from Gk. e(/rphw, `to creep.'
Learn more at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.
The shine on a hardwood floor can get scuffed away over time, or foam may get stuck to it from years under a carpet. Typically it's not so bad that you can't hire someone to come in and refinish it to look like new.
Do not mistake laminate for hardwood. Laminate is a kind of plywood sponge. A few hours under standing water, and the stuff begins to look like the Pillsbury Doughboy's syrup-streaked cousin.
Often what is referred to as Hartree-Fock is really only `Unrestricted' Hartree-Fock (UHF, q.v.).
Since 1944, the HFPA has administered the Golden Globe Awards. These are annual awards for American movies and (since 1956) TV programs, second in prominence to the Academy Awards and the Emmy Awards (for movies and TV, resp.). The Golden Globes are awarded on the basis of voting by journalists for foreign media who are based in California.
In Roxanne (1987) he plays C.D. Bales, the Cyrano de Bergerac character whose eloquence is borrowed by Chris McConnell, a pretty face in front of an empty skull, played by Rick Rossovich.
A number of Martin's routines have to do with pharaohs, whose brains were removed and stored separately during the embalming process.
Learn more at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.
The Roman god Mercury, typically depicted with winged feet (depictions do often include toes, though), was the god of thieves and translators, so hermeneutics was named after him (his Greek name is Hermes), as have a number of newspapers, including the San Jose Mercury.
Hatters once used mercuric nitrate to soften and shape felt, poisoning
themselves in the process. Hence the term ``mad as a hatter,'' immortalized by
Lewis Carroll:
Here's some other stuff that's related.
After a few years of publication under its original short title, the usual title bloat set in, and after 1897 it was known as Quellen und Darstellungen zur hansischen Geschichte (QDhG).
Bandgap is 0.15 eV; lattice constant is 6.373 Å.
Hamburg, Germany's largest port, is fifty-plus kilometers up the Elbe River from the coast, and traditionally benefitted from traffic along the Elbe in parts of northern Germany. During the period of the two Germanies, Hamburg in West Germany lost trade from those regions, which lay mostly in East Germany (GDR), and compensated to some extent by cultivating business with Scandinavia.
Ran for president in 1968 and lost a close election to Richard Milhous Nixon (RMN).
Remembered for saying that he would eat the paper the bill was written on, if the voting rights act of 1964 led to what we now call reverse discrimination or quotas, which RMN imposed by executive order.
There's a Herbert Hoover Highway in Iowa, but I haven't seen it abbreviated HHH.
In deciding whether to challenge a horizontal business merger (under section 7 of the Clayton Act), the DOJ and FTC consider various factors, including ease of entry and concentration trends in the relevant market, financial condition of firms (an unmerged company that soon fails will not prevent market concentration), etc.
Nevertheless, the starting point for analysis is the HHI. Under DOJ-FTC guidelines, a market with pre-merger HHI below 1,000 is regarded as unconcentrated, and the merger is unchallenged. Note that HHI < 1000 means that there are at least ten companies, and that no single company can have a market share exceeding 31.62%; if the pre-merger market is dominated by two companies (with market shares near 23.6%), their merger can double the HHI to near 2000.
If pre-merger HHI is between 1000 and 1800, the industry is considered moderately concentrated and will usually be challenged only if it is expected to increase HHI by 100 points or more.
A market with HHI exceeding 1800 is considered highly concentrated; mergers that increase HHI by 50 to 100 then ``raise significant competitive concerns.''
In any case where a leading firm has market share exceeding 35%, merger with a firm having as little as 1% share may be challenged.
All that said, since the 1980's there's been substantial shift in legal thinking on what constitutes monopoly power, with a deemphasis of raw size concerns and a greater concern with how markets work, and in particular on whether customers are deprived in some way relative to the prices and choices that would be available in a less concentrated market. Still, all those what-ifs are harder to measure than market share.
The formulation of the HHI implies that square of market share is a proper measure of market power. According to Metcalfe's Law, the value of a network varies similarly.
For wood and natural gas, latent heat of vaporization is the most important component of the difference between energy released by a combustion and heating done by it. Of course, the thing most effectively heated by combustion is the exhaust gas, and the efficiency of a furnace is mainly a measure of how effectively the exhaust gas is cooled -- i.e., how much of the ``heating value'' is saved from direct loss to the environment in exhaust. (Some of the heating value is emitted as radiation during the reaction, and may never go into the reaction products.)
In the Hawaiian language, Hawaii is spelled Hawai`i. The opening single quote indicates the glottal stop consonant, the sound of ``tt'' in most Americans' pronunciation of ``cotton.''
The Villanova University Law School provides some links to state government web sites for Hawaii. USACityLink.com has a page with a few links.
German Jewish refugees in Latin America pronounced it ``HEE-ahs'' (i.e., as it'd be pronounced in Spanish if written jías).
Rev. Jesse Jackson used to go around (still does, for all I know) getting schoolchildren to repeat ``I am somebody.''
The word hijo (`son') comes from the Latin filius with the same meaning (source of the English word filial). (Interesting, and not really surprising, that filius is one of those words with a distinctive vocative form differing from the nominative: fili. For more on that, see the entry for Brute.) In Latin, a filius terrae, literally `a son of the earth,' is an expression meaning `a nobody' or `an unknown person.' A similar Latin word, filum (`thread,' compare English filament) became hilo in Spanish. For more on the f --> h sound shift, see the Spanish entry.
Okay, let's do some more on the Spanish words. There's a tendency for bilis to be used as a technical or physiological term. Thus, a gall bladder is una vesícula de bilis. Conversely, hiel is used in nontechnical Spanish usage, where it can mean `bile' in the narrow sense, or something bitter. The latter sense is implied by the verb helear, which means `to make bitter,' normally in the fairly literal sense of `adding a bitter ingredient.' It's not a very useful word, except possibly for Spanish-speaking karela-eaters (living in Kerala, I imagine). The common verb amargar (related to amargo, `bitter-tasting') means `to make bitter, to embitter' and is frequently used in metaphorical senses. Hiel is also used simply in the sense of `bitterness.' This is particularly common in belles lettres (or is that lettres bilieuses?).
There's a common proverb no hay miel sin hiel, literally `there's no honey without bitterness.' This can be compared with the English proverb, ``too many cooks spoil the broth.'' Well, I said it could be compared -- I didn't say it was comparable. Another one is ``No bees, no honey; no work, no money.'' The one I learned was ``el que quiere celeste, que le cueste,'' literally `he who wants light blue [the sky], let it cost him [work].'
Miscellaneous paragraphs follow. Sometimes you want to mention something, but you don't want to interrupt the flow, you know? And then it's too late.
Spanish nouns derived from Latin neuters generally become masculine. (There is no neuter gender in Spanish. The Inquisition, you know. And Opus Dei.) Quite interestingly, although fel is neuter, the derived noun hiel is feminine. These things befall in the best of families, but more often in linguistics than zoology. Perhaps the gender change was due to the influence of female bilis, or maybe el hiel (`the gall') just sounded too sing-songy.
There's an idiom sin hiel. If the phrase makes no sense in context, you can understand it as `excellent.'
``Hi-Fi'' as an adjective for sound equipment is almost as superfluous as ``electronic'' to describe a computer. The term was used by our parents to describe their status-competition toys. In the 1970's when we started buying decent equipment of our own, we discarded (i.e., the marketing people decided that we would discard) the now old-fashioned term Hi-Fi. The radio lost its speaker and output stage (amplifier) and became a tuner. The record player lost its amplifier and speaker(s) and became a turntable. You combined one or more of these items with an amplifier and a couple of loudspeakers and you had a ``component system.'' The components had different brand names on them. They started to come from Japan; soon they all came from Japan. A turntable that came in a single box with an amplifier (what an innovative concept!) was a stereo. Often the stereo came bundled with a radio tuner. In the seventies you could get an old-style combination: a stereo with radio tuner, plus eight-track or cassette or (rarer) both, in a ``compact'' unit.
In the late 90's or so, the old-fashionedness of the term now bleached out by three decades' lying in the cold sun of the linguistic scrap heap, ``Hi-Fi'' has been dusted off and pasted onto some CD players.
Since the download of high-fidelity audio data requires high bandwidth or patience, webpages now often offer a Lo-Fi option.
Chaucer made use of the verb substantially, Shakespeare rarely. Twain embraced it in his Tale of a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889). [The action in that story is set mostly in the sixth century, but the language is Modern English colored with bits of Elizabethan (Early Modern English) archaisms.]
Over the centuries, there has been considerable confusion regarding the conjugation of this verb, with the vowel wobbling about and the parts of the verb interchanging. For this reason, it is clear that the verb should now be regularized: hight, highted, (have) highted, highting. See also contemn and clepe.
C.R. Haines uses hight in his translation, for the Loeb Classical Library, of the correspondence of Fronto. Specifically, in the third paragraph of the first letter -- a somewhat chastising letter from Fronto to his former student Marcus Aurelius, designated successor to Caesar Pius. (In this connection, it's amusing to read the so-called Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. The first section is a list of acknowledgments, and around the middle of the list, Fronto has his paragraph and a carefully measured-out teaspoon of praise.) Haines uses the construction is hight [sic], so we may take the publication year of that volume (1919) as a convenient date marking the death of this verb, before its resurrection in this entry.
Very possibly, it is not accidental that the word occurs in this particular paragraph. The paragraph is about word choice -- beginning with Cicero's and going on to critique that of his correspondent Aurelius. According to Fronto (in Haines's English): ``Wherefore I commend you greatly for the care and diligence you shew [sic] in digging deep for your word and fitting it to your meaning. But, as I said at first, there lies a great danger in the enterprize [sic] lest the word be applied unsuitably [pause here and reflect] or with a want of clearness or a lack of refinement, as by a man of half-knowledge, for it is much better to use common and everyday words [volgaribus et usitatis] than unusual and far-fetched ones [remotis et requisitis], if there is little difference in real meaning.'' I am in perfect concord with this sentiment. The early Loebs are notorious for their archaic English. To judge by his 1889 work Christianity and Islam in Spain (756-1031), Haines was not normally quite so old-fashioned. (He did use shew and show verb forms in about equal numbers in the 1889 work, however, and by that time shew was distinctly a minority usage even among British writers. Then again, even in 2007 I know a Latin teacher in England who still writes shew.)
In the particular case of Fronto, however, the archaizing is probably appropriate, since he was deeply conservative regarding language and literature. Though born around 90 CE, he hated the modernism of people like Seneca, and only cared for the old republican writers. One even gets the impression that his praise of Cicero was grudging. Fronto's use of the variant volgaribus (see above) instead of the now-standard vulgaribus is probably an instance of his preference for old usages. (In the original manuscripts, of course, there was no graphical u/v distinction, so these words were written uolgaribus and uulgaribus.) At least, -uus nominatives could be and usually were written with -uos until the Golden Age (70 BCE-18 CE).
One thing obvious from Fronto's letters is that he liked to pile on the words, apparently to show off that he knew them. The reason that one obtains that impression is that, quite frankly, the supernumerary words often added little of significance and just reduced precision, accuracy, and overall correctness, so to speak.
An online introduction is available from Texas Center for Superconductivity at the University of Houston. The ORNL HTSC homepage (apparently this is technically the homepage for ``Superconductivity for Electric Power Systems'') is pedagogically useful as well.
Other useful information sites are SUPRAS and the Los Alamos server form for e-prints. There's also an electronic journal called High TC Update.
The English word fig and the Spanish word higo are both derived from Latin ficus, and both show the revoicing of the cee. (The letter c in Latin is essentially a gamma that lost its voicing. If you think I'm gonna explain that one again, you gotta'nother thing comin'.) The eff and aitch sounds are closely related. This can be seen in Japanese, where the syllables associated with ha are hi, fu, he, and ho. (Note, though, that the eff there is bilabial, represented in the IPA by the character phi.) The eff/aitch similarity can be seen in English, where the original aitch-like /x/ or /ç/ sound still found in Scottish loch evolved into eff (rough, tough) or disappeared (high, nigh). In Spanish, a number of Latin initial eff's became aitches, and aitch is now silent. Other examples: hacer, `make, do,' from Latin facere; herir, `injure,' from ferire; hierro, `iron,' from ferrum; hijo, `son,' (cf. hidalgo) from filum; horno, `oven,' from furnus; humo, `smoke,' from fumus.
The word higo is used figuratively in Spanish to suggest something small, somewhat as in the English expression ``I don't care a fig.'' However, in Spanish it is used more, uh, figuratively, if you catch my drift.
The lives of professional athletes are popular subjects of Hi-Lo. This strikes me as ironically appropriate, though there are, uh, many exceptions. Cf. El-Hi.
Babahindi is a `turkey cock,' and baba is one of the words meaning `father.' (Internationally, of course, ata is better known. Both words, along with cet [`grandfather'], have a scattering of generalized senses like `ancestor, forefather, elder.') There are many compounds beginning in baba, including babaanne (`paternal grandmother' -- so that's what the Beach Boys were singing about!), but a similar construction for any other bird does not seem to be common. For example, the peafowl is tavus, and the peacock and peahen are tavus kusu and disi tavus, respectively. (Please mark your screen with a cedilla under the s in kusu and in disi.) A drake is an erkek ördek (literally a `duck cock') and a gander is an erkek kaz.
A turkey buzzard (more commonly called ``turkey vulture'' outside the US) is a ``hindi akbabasι.'' I assume this is a loan translation rather than a coincidence; akbaba means `vulture.'
That's almost 100,000 times fainter than Sirius, the radio satellite, errr, satellite radio. Oh, wrong Sirius! Seriously, it's Sirius, the Dog Star, 26 times greater absolute magnitude than our sun and a mere stone's throw away (8.6 ly). It's the brightest star in the night sky.
- HIPPI-PH
- PHysical layer standard ANSI/X3.183-1991.
- HIPPI-FP
- Framing Protocol, ANSI/X3.210-1992.
- HIPPI-LE
- Link Encapsulation, ANSI/X3.218-1993.
- HIPPI-IPI-3
- Intelligent Peripheral Interface.
- HIPPI-SC
- Switch Control, ANSI/X3.222-1993.
- Disk Connections
- ANSI/ISO 9318-3.
- Tape Connections
- ANSI/ISO 9318-4.
It's commonly found in the urine of herbivores and, as you can probably guess, it was first identified in the urine of horses. It's formed in the kidneys by reaction of benzoic acid with the amino acid glycine, and it's a way that herbivores get rid of excess benzoic acid in some plants. Hippuric acid normally occurs only in trace amounts in humans and carnivores.
H H
\ /
\ /
C-----C
/ ___ \
/ / \ \
H---C ( ) C---H
\ \___/ /
\ /
C-----C
/ \
/ \
H C===O
/
/
H---N H
\ /
\ /
C
/ \
/ \
H C===O
/
/
O
\
\
H
Here's something geographically numb-brained from the US Census Bureau:
In September 1968, Congress authorized President Lyndon B. Johnson to proclaim National Hispanic Heritage Week. The observance was expanded in 1988 to a monthlong celebration (Sept. 15 -- Oct. 15). America celebrates the culture and traditions of U.S. residents who trace their roots to Spain, Mexico and the Spanish-speaking nations of Central America, South America and the Caribbean. Sept. 15 was chosen as the starting point for the celebration because it is the anniversary of independence of five Latin American countries: Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua. In addition, Mexico and Chile celebrate their independence days on Sept. 16 and Sept. 18, respectively.
There used to be a Smithsonian Heritage Months page where, at least during Hispanic Heritage Month, you could find a link for ``evento calendarios,'' which was apparently intended to be Spanish. In Spanish, it means `calendars event' -- i.e., the event having to do with calendars. They've fixed that, but their bilingual stuff is still basically in English and translated English.
In passing, I should note that the homepage of ``Smithsonian Education'' is now set up with links based on who you are rather than on the information you want. The who-you-are approach works reasonably well for toilets, but the only thing it does well for information is insult. It's like the old ``Women's Section'' of the newspaper: tell us who you are, and we'll tell you what you want to know, dear. University homepages make the same offensive assumption. You want the Chemistry Department? Please tell us if you are staff, student, or money-ba-a-ah....err, heh-heh, alumnus/a/um.
The term natural history ought to give you a hint of that. It comes from the Latin historia naturalis. That was the title of a sort of compendium of universal knowledge compiled by Pliny the Elder, and for him natura was a little more inclusive than our nature, which deserves its own entry, eventually. For now I'll just mention that like Linneaus in the eighteenth century, Pliny dealt not just with the animal and vegetable but also the mineral kingdom, both wild (as found `in nature') and domesticated (dyes and other technology), and also the weather, and other stuff. He really wanted to cram all knowledge into his encyclopedia, and at 37 books it is believed to be nearly complete, but curiosity killed that cat. He died in A.D. 79 when he went to investigate the volcanism of Mount Vesuvius, which erupted and covered Pompeii and Herculaneum. (He succumbed to toxic gases on the shore of the Bay of Naples.)
Histôria was a term borrowed from Greek, meaning `investigation,' so natural history is the investigation of nature. It was only gradually that the sense of the word historia (apart from special contexts like historia naturalis) became specialized to the investigation only of past human events.
The Greek histôria was based on the verb histôrein, `to inquire,' related to the noun histôr, `learned man.' No, no, his doesn't mean `man' here. (If anything, *-tor does; it's an element in archaic Greek men's names, such as Nestor, Hector, and Mentor in Homer, and in no women's names that I can think of. That would make story, derived from history, the more purely gendered term. Make of this what you will, but leave me out of it.)
Histôr is generally agreed to be a suffixed form *wid-tor of the common Indo-European root *weid-, meaning `to see.' The same root also led to the Greek words eidos (`form') and idea (`form,' `appearance,' and `idea'). (Hence Plato's ``idealism'' was his ``theory of the forms.'')
The University of Kansas serves a number of history resources such as the Virtual Library page for History and a linked Index of Resources for Historians. (That means that if you're not a licensed historian, you're not allowed to use them. Stay AWAY!)
At least two sets of strains are distinguished -- HIV1 and HIV2. HIV probably evolved from SIV, which induces symptoms more like HIV2. Cf. FIV.
HIV-tainted needles in gas-pump handles? A hoary urban legend; check out the UL entry.
One frequently encounters the usage ``HIV virus'' (an acronym-assisted AAP pleonasm). For clarity or emphasis, or for some unknown reason, ``HI virus'' is sometimes used. The spelling looks somewhat insensitively upbeat. On the other hand, it goes with the thoughtfully constructed adjective ``HI-viral.''
Any chance this guy is a distant relative of Max Headroom?
A lot of us nonbelievers are secretly hoping that he comes back anyway, just to hear him say ``No, no! That's not what I meant at all!''
Here's the Hong Kong page of an X.500 directory.
The SAR entry has even less information about Hong Kong.
When I was there in August 1990, ground crew were eating lunch on the tarmac, in the shade of 747 wings.
Here's a list of computing languages with online resources.
Large blocks of rental units always seem to develop negative social connotations, and words associated with them become pejorative in various ways. Those ways vary among different languages and we'll visit that topic here eventually (for Spanish, English, and German).
Properly, that should be written ``Hln, formerly known as headLine News.'' It's a wasted opportunity, of course. They should have called it TCNNFKAHLN (The Cable News Network Formerly Known As HeadLine News). And maybe they will. It seems to get some kind of rebranding every few years. It was launched as CNN2 in 1982, was Headline News 1983-1989, HN 1989-1992, Headline News again 1992-1997, CNN Headline News 1997-2007, and HLN since then. During the HN era and the first year or so of the HLN era, ``Headline News'' was regularly used appositively. Therefore, while it is fair to identify it as ``HLN, formerly known as Headline News,'' it is preferable, because ridiculous and accurate, to write ``HLN, formerly known as HLN, Headline News.''
For most of its existence, it has provided what ``headline'' implies: a condensed version of the news, repeated on a 30-minute loop. It was like the old WINS 1010 AM radio station in New York, which used to repeat, frequently: ``you give us twenty-two minutes, we give you the news.'' (Well it sounded like a comma splice.) The loop actually repeated exactly three times per hour, but they wanted you to show up early and hear the final two minutes of ads from the previous cycle. I would foil them by rehearing the weather report instead.
Since 2005, the once and future Headline News has shifted toward another kind of content strongly associated with headlines: tabloid programming. I believe they're now featuring two hours of Nancy Grace (``television's only justice themed/interview/debate show for those interested in the breaking news of the day'') twelve times daily. Notice that they say ``for those interested in the breaking news.'' Even they aren't claiming that it's always breaking.
Horace Mann, as you probably realize, is also the name of a person. Horace Mann (1796-1859) was an early advocate of free universal public education. He was known as the ``father of the American public school,'' but that's a lot of syllables; his friends probably called him ``Horace.'' (Even though ``Horace'' is disyllabic, it's practically as atomic as ``Paul.'') He was elected the first secretary of the Board of Education of Massachusetts when that was founded in 1837. The Horace Mann School traces its history back to the Horace Mann Lincoln School, founded in 1887 and described today at our HML entry.
See also the Hardwood Agents and Brokers Association (HABA).
HML was a progressive school, and after John Dewey joined the TC faculty in 1904, it only got more progressive. The school was also politically ``progressive.'' It may have had a limousine-liberal period, but eventually the student body came to be mostly red-diaper babies. The philosopher John Searle, who attended HML in the 40's, recalled in this 1999 interview that, as a mere socialist, he ``was sort of the class right-winger of the ninth grade.''
``The Horace Mann School for Boys moved to Riverdale in 1912, and during the 1940's, severed formal ties with Teachers College and became Horace Mann School. The HM School for Girls remained at Teachers College through the 1940's.'' I read somewhere that that closed in 1948, and that its old building is now New York's P.S. 125.
Can't take a hint, can you?
A brief explanation of the origin of the HMO can be found on the web.
If you can't enter the umlauted character in the text, write ``Hueckel'' for Hückel.
``H-Net is an interdisciplinary organization of scholars dedicated to developing the enormous educational potential of the Internet and the World Wide Web. The computing heart of H-Net resides at Michigan State University, but H-Net officers, editors and subscribers come from all over the globe.''
Yeah, yeah, I'm sure they do a lot of fine stuff, but primarily they're known for setting up mailing lists for some of the more electronically halt and lame among humanistic and social scientific learned societies.
in erbia earth by Per Theodor Cleve, who named it after the Latin name of his
native city, Stockholm. Perhaps the reason for the resemblance between that
city's Latin name and
Swedish name is the fact that the city was founded
in the thirteenth century. On the other hand, for a long time the place was
Christiana. Oh wait -- that's Oslo. Never mind.
Learn more at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.
Henry Mitchell MacCracken, a chancellor of New York University, conceived the idea of a pantheon of great Americans, and coined the name ``Hall of Fame'' for it. It was founded in 1900 and built on what was then the uptown campus of NYU. It opened in 1901 with 29 inductees.
A surprisingly uninquisitive Dave Blevins did not even address the question of priority in his nevertheless interesting book Halls of Fame (2004). It's subtitled An International Directory, and in addition to a few he found in the US, he gamely listed HoF's in Canada and 17 other countries. (He counted ``more than fifteen countries.'' Maybe he was running out of toes, or maybe he just had a nagging suspicion that possibly the Irish Music Hall of Fame in Dublin, Ireland, is not in the UK.)
According to the back cover, more than 450 HoF's are listed. I'm not going to check, but here are some numbers I can compute easily:
- US: 229
- Canada: 45 (!)
- RoW: 17
Blevin is also the author of UFO Directory International: 1000+ Organizations and Publications in 40+ Countries (2003).
In July 1995, a stray Vietnamese potbellied pig named Chi-Chi discovered a shiny black hog belonging to Walter Wyatt, in the yard of Wyatt's home in Key West, Florida. Excited, Chi-Chi mounted the brand-new hog's front tire and tried to mate with it. Okay, perhaps it succeeded in mating with it. Who's to say? Walter's wife Patricia witnessed the whole thing from her kitchen and called police. The 50-pound animal did at least $100 of damage to the object of his affections, scratching the paint and tearing the bike's fabric cover. It must've been hot.
According to animal control officers, state law requires all unclaimed strays to be neutered, and the owner, not identified in news reports, declined to claim him. Many locals, including the assault victim's owner, felt that the punishment was too harsh. I say the punishment fit the crime better than the victim did, but Walter Wyatt said, ``His crime is an alleged sex act against a Harley. We don't even know if that's a felony!'' A ``Spring Chi-Chi'' defense fund raised $300, and Wayne Smith, president of the Monroe County Bar Association, handled the case on a pro bono basis. ``The punishment could be death or what some males may consider a fate worse than death,'' said Smith.
What were the alternatives? A local motorcycle dealer said he might let Chi-Chi go hog-wild in his showroom, just to get it out of his system. ``Just a night's stay.'' One man offering to adopt Chi-Chi sent a letter to the Chamber of Commerce. It ended ``P.S. I have a broken scooter. It's his.'' Chi-Chi was fixed and retired to a local petting zoo.
Florida seems to produce a disproportionate share of animal-related weird news. For another example, read about the trouser snake at CREAMER. For more about potbellied pigs see NAPPA. Many NAPA distributors also carry motorcycle parts.
I'd like to mention that Key Lime pie was invented in Key West, but I can't think of a good excuse to do so. One of the factors in the creation of that confection was the widespread use of canned condensed milk there, at a time when it was less common elsewhere in the country. This must have been due to Key West's isolation. Isolation was probably a factor in the siting of the Agriculture Department's Animal Import Center at nearby Fleming Key. On July 26, 1989, six years to the day before Chi-Chi's case was heard in Key West, the Ag department officially admitted a herd of Chinese hogs after four months of tests at the center. The herd of 140 animals included three breeds: Meishan, Ming and Feng-Jing. They had been purchased by the University of Illinois and Iowa State University for breeding experiments. The breeds were described as ``unusually prolific''; their twice-yearly litters average 16 to 20 newborn, with a record of 33. They must suckle in shifts. Most U.S. breeds have litters of 10 to 12. (I couldn't bring myself to write ``only 10 to 12.'') I should probably also mention the nearby Bay of Pigs. Done.
Also -- you know those double burgers with the pre-positioned cheese slice between the patties? Take it out or start over.
Also, when I say ``Taco Salad, hold the lettuce,'' yes, that means I want no cheese with it. Obviously, I meant ``hold the cheese'' and misspoke. ``It comes with cheese'' is not an acceptable response.
BTW, it's not necessary literally to hold the cheese, just don't put it on the food item.
Time passed, and people forgot. In Waiting (chapter 9 -- see LBI entry), social scientist Debra Ginsberg actually went to the trouble of explaining, as if to a child, that ``a couple on a date early in their relationship will either both have garlic in their meals or request that it be entirely removed from their dishes.'' At least she realized that it could go without saying, that the latter group experiences less satisfaction.
Wood seems somehow to be prototypical stuff. When you try to conjure up an image of nonspecific stuff, likely as not the image you conjure will be of wood or clay. That's my theory, anyway. I mean, if someone says ``a fish'' out of the blue, the mental image evoked is not likely to be of a barracuda or a zebra fish or even a mature flounder. You're more likely to imagine something that looks roughly like a cod. It's like that. For supporting evidence, see the HYLE entry. Another bit of evidence is in the fact that the German word Klotz, meaning `block,' is understood to mean a block of wood if the material is not otherwise specified. More about that word is now at the klutz entry.
Lakes Erie and Ontario have areas 25,719 sq. km (9,930 sq. mi.) and 19,477 sq. km (7,520 sq. mi.), resp.
- Cloth woven by hand.
- You're looking for stuff about Norman Rockwell. Try the NYC entry.
Cf. (the less common) HODO.
Ears, snouts and innards,
A homogeneous mass.
Pass another slice.
See also the navel entry.
- affect
- agape (adjective meaning ``wide open'' or the Greek word for a kind of `love,' adopted in certain specialized senses in Christianity)
- aged
- are (metric area unit or second-person form of the verb to be)
- axes (plural of axe or of axis)
- bases (plural of base or of bases)
- bass (low pitch, or fish)
- bow (part of a crossbow or part of a ship)
- buffet (verb or noun)
- chile
- cleanly (adjective [short vowel] or adverb [long vowel])
- close (verb or adverb)
- coax (two syllables as short form of co-axial connector; one syllable as verb meaning persuade)
- commune (noun or verb)
- content (noun or adjective)
- converse (noun related to conversion or verb related to conversation)
- convert (noun or verb)
- conjugate (verb or adjective)
- defect (initial syllable stressed in noun; second stressed in verb)
- defense (stress usually on second syllable of noun, except in sports; in team sports, stress is initial in both noun and verbed noun)
- delegate (verb or noun)
- deserts
- does (third-person singular of do, or plural of doe)
- dove (the bird, or the preterite of dive)
- dying (present participle of die or dye)
- effect (verb has long initial e in some pronunciations)
- entrance (verb and noun)
- Espy (the surname, pronounced ``ESS-pea'' or the verb, pronounced ``ess-PIE,'' appearing capitalized at the beginning of an imperative sentence)
- Evelyn (two syllables as a male name, three syllables as female; also, although the distinction is not reliable in British English, the first e is long for a male name, short for female)
- house
- import
- lead (metal whose name rhymes with led, or verb with the past tense led)
- live
- lives
- minute (noun and adjective)
- mobile (noun and adjective)
- multiply (verb and adverb)
- periodic (short e and long i in the chemical name)
- precipitate (verb or adjective)
- predicate (verb or noun)
- primer
- putter
- putting
- read (past tense or present tense form of read; rhymes with lead)
- recall (initial syllable stressed in either sense of noun; second stressed in either sense of verb)
- refuse (the noun, with short e and accent on first syllable, and final sibilant voice, and the verb, with none of these)
- reject (initial syllable stressed in noun; second stressed in verb)
- resent (sent again, or be resentful)
- resort (voiced or unvoiced s)
- row
- secreted (past of secrete and of secret, a transitive verb meaning hide)
- sewer (sewage conduit or seamster)
- severer (comparative of severe and agentive noun of sever)
- singer (one who sings or singes)
- sliver (short i in most senses, long i in textile sense)
- supposed (verb or adj.)
- tarry (delay or tarred)
- taxes (plural of tax or of taxis)
- taxis (plural of taxi, or the medical manipulation of a body part back into normal position after an injury)
- tear
- unionized (organized into a union, or not ionized)
- tower
- use (and abuse, reuse, ...; verb or noun)
- wicked
- wind
- winged
- wound
Margaret Carlson describes this as a joke ``[a]mong consultants'' in her March 27, 2008, ``Commentary'' at <Bloomberg.com>, entitled ``Hillary's Just Making It Up As She Goes Along.''
In the movie Duck Soup, which begins with a shot of ducks swimming in a bowl (IIRC), Groucho says
Gentlemen, Chicolini may talk like an idiot, and look like an idiot, but don't let that fool you. He really is an idiot.
HOPOS also referred to ``[t]he History of Philosophy of Science Working Group ... an international society of scholars who share an interest in promoting research on the history of the philosophy of science and related topics in the history of the natural and social sciences, logic, philosophy, and mathematics. We interpret this statement of shared interest broadly, meaning to include all historical periods and diverse methodologies. We aim to promote historical work in a variety of ways, including the sponsorship of meetings and conference sessions, the publication of books and special issues of journals, maintaining an email discussion group, and the dissemination of information about libraries, archives and collections, and bibliographic information.''
The biennial meetings of HOPOS are also called HOPOS, or more specifically HOPOS '98, HOPOS 2000, HOPOS 2002, HOPOS 2004 (San Francisco), etc.
Between the time when I first put this entry in (around 2002) and today (2004), the ``working group'' has renamed itself ``The International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science,'' and slightly reworked its self-description with more formal and less personal wording. HOPOTH abideth within the membership of la FISP.
(And FISP is a member of CIPSH. It's like Russian dolls.)
horology.com offers a comprehensive index of internet resources. There's also an Antiquarian Horological Society (AHS). Washington University hosts a museum wall of old clocks and a nice sundial.
If you ask scholars of eighteenth-century English literature (dieciochistas) what the greatest work of their period is, a large fraction will answer that it was Tristram Shandy -- Laurence Sterne's strange (``experimental''!) novel published in 1760. It has an extremely discursive style, even for its era. The book begins at the very beginning, with Tristram's conception, and a clock plays a pivotal role in that beginning.
Tristram's father made a very regular habit, the first Sunday night of each month, of personally winding a large house-clock that stood at the head of the back stairs. The book is written as a first person narrative, and it includes this delicately phrased report:
...it so fell out at length, that my poor mother could never hear the said clock wound up, -- but the thoughts of some other things unavoidably popp'd into her head, -- & vice versâ : -- which strange combination of ideas, the sagacious Locke, who certainly understood the nature of these things better than most men, affirms to have produced more wry actions than all other sources of prejudice whatsoever.
Shandy was conceived ``betwixt the first Sunday and the first Monday in the month of March, in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighteen....'' By the workings of his mother's vice versa clause above, as they were doing the deed, she quoth, ``Pray, my dear, have you not forgot to wind up the clock?'' This untimely question disturbed his father, and in so doing it ``scattered and dispersed the animal spirits, whose business it was to have escorted and gone hand-in-hand with the HOMUNCULUS, and conducted him safe to the place destined for his reception'' thus damaging him for life.
In mid-June 2004, Blind River, Ontario, a town of 4,000 on the northern shore of Lake Huron, had a related experience: all the electric clocks gained about ten minutes per day against the eastern time kept in surrounding areas and by computers and VCR's in the same town. It eventually turned out that, in order to do some maintenance work, engineers of Hydro One (the power utility) had taken Blind River off the Ontario power grid and supplied the town from a local generator. That generator's frequency was slightly higher than the usual 60 Hz.
What, you were expecting some connection with Tristram Shandy? No. This story is only connected -- and that most tenuously -- with the dueling time zones entry.
Okay, a thumbnail description: history of science is historical inquiry (now ``interrogation,'' in the pomo term) designed to demonstrate that scientists are fundamentally self-deluded and irrational. Because the majority of in-fashion historians of science like science as much as they like scientists, HOS is increasingly externalist.
One of the interesting emerging research problems in this careful field of scholarship is ``the Science Wars.'' The circumstances of the Science Wars are the following: Working scientists (natural scientists, I mean) mostly ignore philosophy of science because it is of no use, and ignore history of science, as written by historians rather than scientists, because it is no good.
Time-out for an opposing opinion: Scientists dislike philosophy of science because it exposes their unthinking prejudices, and ignore history of science, as written by historians rather than scientists, because it is not Whiggish and so does not flatter scientists' triumphalist fantasy. We now return you to the regularly-scheduled rant.
People in HPS have difficulty understanding scientists' POV, because they think that what they're doing is useful (philosophers) or competent (historians). Occasionally, a scientist will notice the spew from HOS, point out that it's garbage, and possibly even trouble to explain why, even though the fact is essentially self-evident. The HOSers will respond by psychoanalyzing the offending scientist. Occasionally the story makes it into the newspapers. This is the Science Wars.
Okay, time for another fit of conscience. Philosophy is useful, though not usually in a practical way, because it attempts to answer the most fundamental questions thinking people have tried to make sense of. Unfortunately, science deals only in approximations. Often excellent approximations, but still not certain enough to hang a heavy philosophical argument on. For example, Newtonian mechanics is an excellent approximation for the reality the eighteenth century could understand, but the qualitative aspects of that theory bore only a partial formal resemblance to the quantum mechanics that replaced it in the twentieth century. So while Newtonian mechanics might be highly accurate in physical terms, in metaphysical terms it wasn't in the same universe, never mind close. Today's physical theories are much more accurate than Newton's and explain a much broader range of phenomena, but there is no reason to suppose that these accurate theories are anything but sand foundations for a metaphysical edifice.
As to HOS, well, a lot of it is garbage, and a lot of it is excellent. Because HOS is not itself a science -- that is, because it does not as a discipline integrate regular tests of theory against experiment, there is no very good way to cast off the ballast, and various ships in the HOS fleet are sinking under the weight of too much pomo freight.
Taking cognizance of the preceding information, you may or not be interested in the discipline's professional society HSS and the fact that the largest, oldest, and probably the best respected (within-field) HOS department in the US is the one at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW), q.v.
The name ``Hoss'' suggested build or strength. Dan Blocker died of a pulmonary embolism following surgery at age 43 (1928.12.10-1972.5.13).
Incidentally, if you're ever in the land of Heinrich Schliemann or anywhere else that German is spoken, you should be careful to distinguish phrases about the weather or environment, such as ``es ist heiß'' (`it is hot') or ``mir ist heiß'' (`it seems hot to me'), from statements about internal conditions like ``ich bin heiß'' (`I am sexually excited, I am in rut'). You wouldn't want your partner to get up and turn on the air conditioner -- it might get very cold in the room (das Zimmer), very fast.
If you only have space in your library for one so-bad-it's-good book, please consider A Short History of Technology, copyright 1954 (details at self-published). It's not by professional historians of technology either; it's by Vice Admiral Harold G. Bowen and Charles F. Kettering. I have two bits of advice about reading it:
- Don't drink and read.
- Vacuum the carpet first. (You'll thank me when you're ROTFL.)
For a sample, read the first two paragraphs of Kettering's foreword:
This booklet is a short history of discovery and invention. It also is an explanation of how our country became the leading industrial nation of the world with the highest standard of living ever attained.It tells how the nameless people of Western Europe by their own inventions, plus those acquired from the Arabs, improved the existing practical arts. The improvement continued until suddenly the mind of man became emancipated from most of the century-old ideas which had been holding him back and he became creative.
Also, they apparently didn't use tents historically, but more permanent structures, despite practicing transhumance (moving their herds between winter and summer pastures). A west African friend told me (in 1982 or so) that people would ask him things like ``do Africans still live in trees?'' But he was still kind of hung up on the colonialism/neocolonialism thing, and it wasn't unknown for him to exaggerate. Also, he claimed that they don't live in trees. I could be more precise with the details, but I'd rather point out that he is now his country's UN ambassador [temporary ``permanent representative to the UN''] and leave his and his country's identities vague.
Once upon a time, there was an African King who kept several thrones hanging around in his grass hut palace. Then one day they all came crashing down. The moral: ``People who live in grass houses shouldn't stow thrones.'' [This was once a widely told pun.]
It is dangerous to try to draw conclusions in English based on spelling alone. The sound-spelling correspondences, er, correlations, depend very much on the origin. The etymologies of -ouse words, as it happens, are a bit varied and occasionally unknown. However, I think it is useful to consider all -ouse words as a group, because they tend to look Germanic and be interpreted as such. (Just as deacon, from Greek via Church Latin, is pronounced like Germanic beacon.) Anyway, I think that the pattern of voicing may have to do with assimilation of voicing in the final consonant of the verb inflected forms. That is, rouse, say, even if it have started with an unvoiced ess, could have gotten a voiced ess first in the frequent form roused. Later, the voicing would have jumped the vowel in rouses and also appeared in rouse, in an instance of psycholinguistic reasoning (in Sapir's sense). Nouns, and words that may be verbs but usually are nouns, would not have been affected. House is then exceptional in a consistent way: unlike most -ouse nouns, its plural has voicing in the root. That is, the first ess in the plural noun houses has a zee sound, just like the second and final ess. So it all pretty much hangs together, if one can explain why the first ess in houses is voiced, even though it's not voiced in similar collocations elsewhere. Probably has something to do with archaic plurals. Uh, yes, um... we'll leave this as an exercise for the reader.
Comments above about current pronunciations tend to reflect my own (typical mid-Atlantic) dialect. Pronunciations vary. AHD4 claims that blouse is somewhere pronounced with a voiced final ess. A regional variation related to house is in the name(s) Houston, q.v.
The first volume of the edition of Manilius now completed was published in 1903, the second in 1912, the third in 1916, and the fourth in 1920. All were produced at my own expense and offered to the public at much less than cost price; but this unscrupulous artifice did not overcome the natural disrelish of mankind for the combination of a tedious author with an odious editor. Of each volume there were printed 400 copies: only the first is yet sold out, and that took 23 years; and the reason why it took no longer is that it found purchasers among the unlearned, who had heard that it contained a scurrilous preface and hoped to extract from it a low enjoyment.
More at the A. E. entry.
There are proposals floating around to allow LEV's in HOV lanes.
Also the title of a (probably justifiably) unknown monologue (by Don Nigro, 1966) in which a woman describes how her ambition to play the role of Lady Macbeth has led to some funny and some sad consequences.
- Sit to one side (i.e. next to the middle) of an old sofa. Ideally, the sofa should be dusty or have loose dry dirt on top, or have threadbare cushions filled with hardened, disintegrating old urea foam.
- Slap the middle of the sofa repeatedly.
- Without moving your legs/lap, twist your upper body sideways to lean down to face the center of the sofa.
- Sneeze involuntarily, surprising yourself.
This method may not be very repeatable, but you won't mind.
- Physical damage coverage. This pays repair/replacement costs for house, unattached buildings on the property, and personal property, and incidental expenses for temporary alternate housing.
- Liability coverage. Pays for liability you or your household or pet(s) may incur for someone else's bodily injury or property damage, or to defend in court against a claim of such liability, or both.
- Medical coverage. Covers the same group as liability, but pays medical expenses. The idea behind this is, say some knucklehead visits and walks into your door. The medical coverage part of your homeowners insurance is a kind of no-fault coverage that pays for an MRI scan to see if his brain cell was damaged. It's hoped that this will take care of sincere nuisances, up to a kilobuck or so. If that won't do, and knucklehead wants you to pay for an intelligence transplant or for mental anguish (oh! the embarrassment!), then he's going to have to sue or settle, and that's where liability coverage for bodily injury kicks in. He'll need to convince a court that it was negligent on your part to have a door, or demonstrate that he was not already stupid before the brain trauma suffered on your property. (And no, it's not hard to find donors for an intelligence transplant. Plenty of people have it and never use it.)
Translation: Speakers' Corner isn't protected from the elements. People so eager to foist their prejudices on the ruling elite that they spend years in graduate school learning to stitch together specious arguments need a published outlet for their ``insights.''
With the liberalization of attitudes that began in the 1970's, it became possible to stigmatize increasingly mild or circumscribed opposition to homosexuality. In this context, a term like HP implies an implausibly exaggerated emotion. Perhaps that contributed to the displacement of HP and HD by the term homophobia, which has the undeniable added advantage of sounding a bit like a clinical diagnosis.
A typical horse can do work at a rate (i.e., a power) greater than one horsepower for short periods of time, but not for long. Astro Boy has a strength of 100,000 horsepower!
``If you don't eat your meat you can't have any pudding!
How can you have any pudding if you don't eat your meat?''
Another food word whose meaning has drifted is sherbet. In the UK it still seems to be a fruit drink (now possibly from Kool-Aid-like powder) cooled with crushed ice (historically also with snow). In North America it refers to a frozen refreshment made from sweetened fruit juice, milk, and an agglutinant (egg white or gelatin). Like ice cream, it is churned while freezing, so the water crystals are small and the bulk opaque. In Australia, sherbet still refers to a beverage, but an alcoholic one -- mostly beer. There's a logic to this: like an iced drink, beer cools you off fast on a hot day.
Microorganisms are called heterotrophic if they rely on other organic material for energy. This includes not only blue-green algae (now called cyanobacteria) but a variety of prokaryotes that perform biochemical feats unknown to (cave) man.
If you don't mind, I'll just sleep in today.
Like Poe (and, less relevantly, Jim Croce), untimely dead and a posthumous hit. He has accumulated a cult, and spawned a USENET newsgroup (news:alt.horror.cthulhu). He liked to invent names with th in unlikely places -- e.g.: Azathoth, Nyarlathotep, Yog-Sothoth, shoggoth.
Service-learning [sic] is an innovative form of community-based education. The word innovative in this and many other contexts describes any old idea and means `promoted by earnest do-gooders constituted as a foundation.' These organizations have a superior understanding of the best ways to perform various activities that they are not directly engaged in, because they have control over the money of a philanthropist who is spinning in his grave. As the saying goes, ``everything is easier for the man who doesn't have to do it himself.'' It's quite amazing that professionals could continue for decades doing their work in the same old ineffective ways, when simple changes, relatively inexpensive once they are funded by the federal government, are so clearly superior. This should not be interpreted, however, as an indication of incompetence on the part of those professionals. Rather, it is only what one would expect from organizations that seemed to function for so long despite the absence of strategic guidance from suits.
Foundation-like thinking also occurs in the private sector, where it is known as the Harvard Business School Syndrome -- the idea that a firm understanding of general business principles is sufficient preparation to run any industry or commerce. Extensive, detailed knowledge of a particular business is recognized as not merely superfluous but detrimental, because it leads to small-picture thinking.
Innovation in both public and private sectors requires ``buy-in.'' That is, previously benighted professionals must be gently guided to enlightenment in a collegial manner, or be eliminated.
You wouldn't want to be quartered in the head of a ship.
But as long as you're here, why don't you have some tea and we can have a chat about the name Hertzsprung. The German word Herz (the t is just old-fashioned or variant spelling) means (and is cognate with the English word) `heart.' The meaning of sprung is a little less clear. It can mean leap, but it sometimes refers to a watch spring. The latter sense makes it fit right in with the preceding entry, but I think the proper interpretation is `sprung from the heart' or `leap of the heart.'
There are a lot of odder Herz- names that are common. Herzbach is `heart brook.' Herzberger or Herzberg is `someone from heart hill' or (what is implicitly the same) `heart hill.' Herzweig is written as a bit of a blend, constructed from Herz and Zweig. Hanks and Hodges offer `heart twig' as a translation, but I think this is slightly, unintentionally misleading. Zweig is indeed cognate with the English word twig, but German does not have a common term for anything larger, like the English word branch. Hence, Zweig covers the entire semantic and quantitative range from twig to branch. If anything, Reis and the diminutives Zweiglein and (rarer) Zweigchen edge in semantically from sprig towards twig (but don't hold me to that; translators must have license). So I would go with `heart branch.' Don't tell me this makes no sense; what is a Harzfeld? (I mean, what does `heart field' mean?) Oh yes, Herz can also mean strong or brave or hardy (from a cognate with the last) or deer (think hart), but these senses are not usually adduced to interpret compound names.
Here's an interesting biographical bit from Hanks and Hodges, s.v. Herz:
The Russian philosopher Alexander Herzen (1812-70) was given this surname because he was technically an illegitimate child, one born of the heart (vom Herzen). His father was Ivan Yakovlev, a Russian nobleman from a minor branch of the Romanovs, and he had married Alexander's mother only according to the Lutheran rite, which was not officially accepted.
Again we see how childhood trauma leads to adult pathologies like philosophy.
Here's the Croatian page of an X.500 directory.
Catbert is the evil HR director (redundant expression, I understand). Go in for your interview.
This HRDC entry is a Canadian-government-related stub. If you want to help improve this entry, you're out of luck, because this isn't Wikipedia. But I'll try to bring it up to snuff myself after I sort out the sloppy reportage.
Ejnar Hertzsprung and Henry Norris Russell independently developed this kind of plot and discovered the main sequence early in the twentieth century.
The University of Michigan Electron Microbeam Analysis Laboratory has put a JEOL 4000EX HREM description online. So does the University of Melbourne Physics Dept.
Learn more at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.
In FY 1998, over 822,000 children were enrolled in 48,000 Head Start classrooms. More information at the HSB entry.
High school is the last few years of secondary education. In most of the US, it is either the last four or the last three years. The latter is often called senior high school, to distinguish it from junior high school (JHS). Further discussion at the MS entry.
In Canada, all or many of the provinces used to offer secondary education through grade 13, and high school would typically be the last four or five years of secondary education -- grades 9-12 (culminating in what was called, in Ontario, SSGD), or 9-13 (SSHGD) for those continuing to university. (In at least one district, grades 7-8 were called ``senior public school.'')
Ontario, the last province to switch over to graduation at grade 12, did so at the end of the school year in Spring 2003. The students graduating from grades 12 and 13 in the high school class of 2003 were called the double cohort. Amazingly, based on original college entrance projections, this was not expected to be a logistical nightmare. Double the number of freshmen the first year? No problem! Twenty-five percent increase in enrollments and housing requirements one year, then a twenty percent decrease four years later? Sure!
Why does HS stand for Holy Spirit and not Holy Smoke or Holy Sepulcher? I don't know. No one knows. You can't understand it -- it's a deep mystery. You just have to believe.
Oh wait -- it can mean ``Holy Smoke''! It's a miracle!
![[dive flag]](images/dflag.gif){kind=small}
Early Head Start was established by the Head Start Reauthorization Act (1994) to assist poor families with infants and toddlers, particularly including children with disabilities, and pregnant women. It is a relatively small program (six hundred projects in FY 1998, serving 35,000 children under the age of three). Small programs for small children -- I think we've got a slogan here.
Same as HSPh.
Oh look! It's Summer 1999 and there's already a BMCR review (it's 99.8.10) for volume 97 (1995).
You know, when we colonize Mars, the HSCT is going to be rail and rockets at first. Aircraft won't work until it gets an atmosphere.
This simple test of significance was first defined -- as a formal test -- only by Tukey, (of FFT fame) in the 1950's. When the HSD value is exceeded, then the assumption that two samples are drawn from a common distribution can be rejected (at a stated significance level). When careless writers HSD for both HSD and standardized range statistic (ideally to be labelled Z), you can sometimes tell the real HSD from the use of a subscript indicating the significance level (typically HSD.05 or HSD.01).
The HSD bound depends on the number of degrees of freedom, the number of levels of the independent variable (essentially the number of different samples available to be compared), and the significance level (alpha, the acceptable level of type-I errors).
HSD values are computed without making any assumption about the form of the underlying distributions. Thus, Tukey's HSD test is more general than the widely used F test, which assumes normal distributions.
J. K. O. Sin, C. A. T. Salama, and L. Z. Hou, ``Analysis and Characterization of the Hybrid Schottky Injection Field Effect Transistor,'' IEDM Technical Digest, 222-225 (1986).
If you were so minded, you could regard the ``railway'' in the company name not as traditional but metaphorical, like the Underground Railroad which once passed through. Coincidentally, here's something from the letter mentioned at the streetcar entry: ``In spite of motorman's knee, as you may know, thirteen motormen escape every year from Rumania. Unfortunately they seek refuge in countries which have given up streetcars, so the problem is even greater than it was.''
``HSSA is dedicated to assisting today's student-athletes throughout the U.S. with educational funding needed to become the leader's of our future.'' The leader's what? Smart bodyguards?
``Let's do the Time Warp Agaaain!''
(Madness takes its toll.)
In traditional terminology, moderately complex oxide anions had prefixes indicating the oxidation state of the base element. Hence, for example, the simple sulfur-based ions are
| Name | Formula |
|---|---|
| sulfide | S- |
| sulfite | (SO3)= |
| sulfate | (SO4)= |
In the case of a nonmetal like nitrogen or chlorine that has a number of stable oxidation states, prefixes hypo- and per- are selectively applied as well:
| Name | Formula |
|---|---|
| chloride | Cl- |
| hypochlorite | (ClO)- |
| chlorite | (ClO2)- |
| chlorate | (ClO3)- |
| perchlorate | (ClO4)- |
The headlines of newspaper and magazine articles are normally not written by the original author of a piece but added by a copy editor or a headline writer. In the latter case HTK is a useful instruction from the copy editor to the compositor. Edited copy can be sent for composition even while the headline writer is still scanning the piece and thinking of a title. ``Composition'' used to be a time-consuming process involving highly-skilled Linotype operators who all lost their old jobs when new computerized equipment came in, but apparently HTK continued to have some utility. As recently as Sunday, March 8, 1998, the Chicago Sun-Times published a letters page where all the letters bore the title HTK (an oversight, of course).
There are, as you've no doubt noticed, many tutorials. Perhaps you haven't seen this one on background, transparency and color from Mike Hutchinson.
This page is an artistic achievement in really bad HT mark-up; check it out!
There's actually something called the HTML Writers' Guild.
Back when I was a theoretical physicist, I tried to get a guild going. If I had succeeded, experimentalists would never be allowed to solve any problem more difficult than a three-by-three matrix inversion. I'm sure both experimentalists and theorists would have benefitted, but labor organization is hard in these times of down-sizing and reengineering.
Here is a relevant excerpt from The Profit of Kehlog Albran (1933-1927):
woman stepped forward and asked, What is the strangest day? Tuesday, the Master explained.
Further down the aforementioned webpage, there is the following explanation of the symbol HTO: ``The winning design team for Phase I consists of Janet Rosenberg & Associates Landscape Architects of Toronto and Claude Cormier Architectes Paysagistes Inc. of Montreal. Together they have created a design known as HTO. The name represents the fundamental changes that will take place in the relationship between Toronto and the waterfront.''
There is a relevant quote from some fourth-century desert monks, but I don't have it handy right now. I think that HTO might be expanded Harbourfront Toronto, Ontario, but that it normally isn't because mere words aren't pretentious enough.
TO is a widely used abbreviation for Toronto. Presumably the official form of the symbol is the one with the T subscripted rather than in a smaller font, and is intended to suggest water (H2O). Subscripts and small-caps are usually at least a little bit inconvenient, and sometimes difficult or impossible, to insert in a printed document, and one sometimes sees the symbol written HtO.
- 2xx
- success
- 3xx
- redirection
- 4xx
- refusal of service
- 5xx
- failure
In particular,
- 200
- "OK" (requested document on the way)
- 301
- "Moved Permanently" (redirect to another URL)
- 302
- "Moved Temporarily" (redirect to another URL)
- 303
- "See Other" (redirect to another URL)
- 304
- "Not modified" (URL is not modified since last indexing)
- 401
- "Authorization required" (login and password)
- 403
- "Forbidden" (you have no access)
- 404
- "Not found"
- 500
- "Internal Server Error" (typically a bad CGI)
- 503
- "Service Unavailable" (host is down or daemon isn't listening; connection timed out)
- 504
- "Gateway Timeout" (stalled out)
Here's the Hungarian page of an X.500 directory.
Enrico Fermi did an estimate of the density of planets with life and intelligent civilizations, and came up with a sufficiently high humber that afterwards he became known for the question, ``where are they? Where is the evidence of alien intelligence?'' [Paradigmatic form of the quote, so far as I can remember right now.] I suppose I should mention that at the SETI entry. Anyway, in the 1940's and 1950's when he was active in the US, there were also a lot of prominent emigre physicists -- refugees -- from Hungary. Very intelligent people like John von Neumann and Leo Szilard and Eugen Wigner. (For others, see Hungarians In America. There I learned that Joseph Pulitzer of Pulitzer Prize fame was born in Makó, Hungary, and that Béla Bartók died in New York City, September 26, 1945.) So somebody answered Fermi's SETI question: ``they are among us, but they call themselves Hungarians.''
Actually, the somebody who gave this answer was Leo Szilard. See Is Anyone Out There?: the scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence, by Frank Drake and Dava Sobel (Delacorte Pr., 1992), p. 130. I should probably have mentioned this at the France entry. Skits involving the Coneheads were a popular feature during the early years of Saturday Night Live, back when SNL was funny. The Coneheads were a family of aliens trying to fit in as an ordinary family in suburban America. To explain away any oddities that might raise the suspicions of their neighbors (but not their two-foot-tall, minuteman-missile-shaped bald heads, which everyone accepted as unexceptional), they claimed that they were from France. (At the time, this was considered so improbable as to be funny.)
One of the Coneheads' oddities was their use of stilted, unnecessarily technical language, which sounded like a bad translation from Latin.
(For something similar, if imagination and memory both fail, check the ISO 9000 Certification entry.) Another example was ``fried chicken embryos'' for fried eggs. This term was technically inaccurate. Hens lay eggs, fertilized or not. The eggs you buy in the store are from hens not serviced by roosters. They can't develop into embryos, and it's pretty obvious that they haven't. We also have an eggs entry.
Microsoft used to promote something called Hungarian notation, which is just as relevant to this entry as anything in the preceding few paragraphs. All Microsoft API's, interfaces, technical articles and excuses used these conventions, which were developed by Charles Simonyi. Basically, it's a convention governing the initial parts of the names of variables, functions, types and constants, classes, objects, and parameters. Here is where I'm going to place a table of the basic prefixes, if I happen to get around to it:
I suppose they investigated people who didn't orient the pie slices to point at their stomachs before eating them. And people who play soccer.
How do they come up with this stuff?
Above the main doorway exiting the computer cluster in Notre Dame's main
library, a sign says ``LOG OFF LIKE A CHAMPION TODAY.'' You're supposed to get
that joke too. What are you, stupid or sumpin'?
I've asked around, and in Japanese there doesn't seem to be a common phrase
that would translate ``It's not the heat, it's the humidity.'' That's a
defect, because the (English) phrase is very appropriate to Japan.
There is much confusion about the meaning of the term human scale. It
is widely used to mean the dimension or length of a hand or a few feet. This
is incorrect. Those are the scales of monkeys and horses. The human scale is
interstellar; we just haven't arrived yet.
Laura Fermi recalled that the physicist Leo Szilard said to Dr. Luria of the
University of Indiana, who didn't know at what level to pitch an explanation
of his work,
Laura once asked her husband Enrico (see FGR,
fermi entries) why physicists were so arrogant,
but I forget his answer. It's somewhere in her biography of him,
Atoms in the Family.
The other common nickname, now used exclusively for the military vehicle
(HMMWV), is Humvee. Interestingly, a military
version of the H2 is being considered by the US
Army. The Humvee was originally intended as a combat vehicle, but has been
used for noncombat missions.
For slightly substantive thoughts on humor, see the
kill the frog entry.
Normal College had been established in 1869 as the Female Normal and High
School, and held its first classes on Valentine's Day in 1870, regarded as the
official founding date of the institution and its successors. Its name was
changed to Normal College of the City of New York later that same year, but it
was still a girls' school. (A normal school, incidentally, is a school that
prepares students to become teachers. As secondary education became common,
normal schools evolved into normal colleges, and in the middle of the twentieth
century the term ``normal college'' was abandoned in favor of ``teachers'
college.'')
In 1879, the length of the program of studies was expanded from three years to
four. In 1888, the minimum age for admission, which had been raised to 14 in
1872, was raised again to 15, and Normal College was authorized to grant
baccalaureate degrees. [The first B.A. was granted only in 1892. Possibly
this is because students in the ``normal'' program were still earning teaching
certificates. The ``classical'' (i.e., nonteaching) program of studies
was only created in 1888.] Only later did the Normal College receive Regents
accreditation and state recognition of its degrees (provisional in 1902, full
recognition in 1908). Miss Rosenbaum graduated from Normal College in 1910 at
the age of 19, with degrees in mathematics and music.
(This implies that she finished in less than four years or was admitted before
reaching age 15, or simply that graduation took place earlier in the year than
admission. According to an article based on a 1995 interview, she enrolled in
1907. Then again, she explained that she never fulfilled her dream of becoming
a concert pianist because her memorization skills weren't too good. (You're
probably wondering why I'm providing this
information. It's not for you. It's because someone else out there
wants to know. Everyone has to wait his turn.) The first president of Normal
College, Thomas Hunter, finally retired in September 1906. In the same
interview she remembered his words from a speech he gave to an assembly there.
That's another reason I distrust the 1907 enrollment date. In April 1914, the
NY State legislature authorized changing the name of Normal College to Hunter
College of The City of New York.
According to her obituary in the New York Times,
Mrs. Hamburger was at that time the youngest graduate in the college's history.
She was too young to obtain a teacher's license, so she accompanied her father
and uncle to Germany. There she went to her first horse race (according to one
news article, and contrary to another) and became hooked
on playing the horses. Back in the US, she attended every Preakness Stakes
from 1915 to 1988, or only 73 between 1915 and 1992, depending on which news
report you want to believe. (Well, okay, the facts don't really depend on your
beliefs. You can believe one story or the other, if you trust one of
the reports. An obviously error-riddled transcript of a brief Bloomberg
broadcast claims she attended every Preakness from 1918-1988, which could of
course be true.)
Even after she became the first woman licensed in Baltimore to sell real estate
(at age 47, in 1938), she still managed her schedule so she
could make it to the track (Pimlico) almost every day. In 1975 she moved to
New York to be near her adult children, and gave up selling real estate to
become a rental agent for a Manhattan building, but eventually returned to
selling real estate. She became a regular at Aqueduct (she also went to
Belmont). She liked
her work apparently only a bit less than her hobby; she finally retired in
1990. ``The market had been absurdly bad,'' was her comment on real estate,
reported from her 100th birthday celebration at the end of that year, ``I miss
it -- life is without a challenge.'' She focused on the track.
(Incidentally, Rose Hamburger's 100th birthday celebration was organized by her
daughter Nancy Sureck. Mrs. Sureck is the founder of Centennial Celebrations,
and has organized them for such institutions as the Statue of Liberty, the
Metropolitan Opera and Carnegie Hall.)
She began to get a lot of attention after she
turned 100. As part of the centennial celebration, Nancy arranged for a
congratulatory letter from the Hunter College president. After that, she was
the guest of honor at several college functions. A letter she wrote to the
Daily Racing Form led to a wave of publicity when she was 100. Aqueduct held a
race in her honor on December 28, 1992 -- the ``Happy 102d Rose'' purse, which
she went to the winner's circle to present.
She came out of retirement to be a racing handicapper (``Gambling Rose'') for
the New York Post, beginning work on her 105th birthday, and she later
appeared on ``Late Night With David Letterman'' and other television programs.
She died the following August.
(In those days, the New York Post was also looking pretty terminal.)
For a long time, hurricanes were given women's names (on the basis of a
scrap of Shakespeare that I forget), but in the seventies it was discovered
that this was sexist, and since then men's and women's names have alternated.
Each successive tropical depression gets a name beginning with the next
letter of the alphabet, and a typical hurricane season has half a dozen
hurricanes. More on hurricane naming at the WMO
entry.
When I showed Mary the glossary entry for
namorido (an equivalent but much more common
Portuguese term), the best English translation she could come up with was
``rentee.'' The word she had in mind, of course, was Leo. Her
nonce word for tenant points up an
interesting problem with the word renter, which is that it refers both
to the person who rents, and to the person who rents: lessor and lessee.
Famous husfriends include Kurt Russell (husfriend of Goldie Hawn),
Steadman Graham (Oprah Winfrey) and Tim Robbins (Susan Sarandon). I've seen
the complementary term gwife (for Goldie, Oprah, etc.). The word, or at
least the five-letter string, appears to be common. However, it seems to be
some kind of Welsh variable name (also gWife), and anyway someday it will be
short for Google Wife.
If you're not sure which of these HVAC's you've got -- you don't want to go
there.
At left, a portable calculator (this was
hardware) is shown.
For information about ``hardware disease,'' see the cow magnet entry.
I'm speechless! I don't know what to say! Okay, I should
probably at least mention Charnel
House Publishing, though. I'll add more if I ever make it back here.
The abbreviations were three letters long. The first two letters were FA, GA,
and HW, for forced air, gravity air, and hot water, respectively. ``Gravity
air heating'' is convective heating. The third letter was G, E, or O, for
natural gas, electric, or oil, respectively.
HWO,
HWG,
FAO,
FAG,
GAG,
and
FAE,
are attested (and the preceding list is ordered roughly from most to least
common in the early 1980's).
Explanation of abbreviation at Rx.
Find equally useful intertextuality at the positive buoyancy entry. Actually,
Casablanca is on the Atlantic coast. Also, the statement about relative
velocities is poorly phrased. It is just that if your speed relative to the
current is less than the speed of the current, then there are directions you
can't go.
This might have something to do with a power generation project.
MY GOD!...WHAT HAVE I DONE?
The ancient Greek word hylê
originally meant `woodland' and `[cut down] wood.' Even Homer used it in an
extended sense to refer to the material or stuff
out of which an object was made. Aristotle was apparently the first
philosopher to recruit the word to mean `matter' in a more general sense.
It may be that at some point, the journal name HYLE was a
backronym -- that is, they may have cooked up an
expansion to coincide with the word. That's the only excuse I can think of for
the fact that they always write the title in all-caps, but I haven't
encountered any such expansion.
You can read the journal online for free, or you can pay money and receive a
paper copy.
According to their
statistics, since 1999 their website has had about 1000 visits a month.
Since 1999, the website you're visiting now has looked just as unsexy as it
does now and has had about 500 visits a day. They should consider adding some
llama humor. And canned beans.
(Time flies when you're having fun. During 2005, the HYLE website had between
10,000 and 20,000 visitors per month. I haven't been preserving a systematic
record of SBF traffic, but 3000 daily visits was typical for 2006, so they're
clearly gaining on us.)
To review: fundamental particles that contain quarks are hadrons, and hadrons
are of two types: mesons, which consist of quark-antiquark pairs, and baryons,
which consist of three quarks. (Particles consisting of three antiquarks may
be called antibaryons, since they're the antiparticles of baryons, or they
may be called baryons, because one doesn't want to complicate the discussion
of baryons with the sometimes extraneous distinction between particles and
antiparticles.) Anyway, the only baryons one can make with only up and down
quarks are the nucleons, so the hyperons are baryons with at least one quark
other than these. Hence, one speaks of strange hyperons, which include a
strange quark.
In the current IUPAC nomenclature, these
are N-(2-phenylethyl)-urea
and N-(2-ethylphenyl)-urea. Some things do improve.
Morley's next paragraph is about ``Ambiguous Names.''
The classical example of hysteron proteron is Virgil's moriamur et in
media arma ruamus, `let us die and charge into the thick of the fight'
(Aeneid bk. ii., l. 358). The unnatural order is here supposed to lend
emphasis, but maybe it just helps the line scan. The English expressions
``head over heels'' (meaning ``heels over head'') and ``have your cake and eat
it too'' (meaning ``eat your cake and still have it'') are examples frozen by
convention. In French and Spanish one has main d'œuvre [main
d'oeuvre if the special character doesn't appear in your browser window]
and mano de obra, respectively. These literally mean something like
`hand of work' and really mean something like `manpower,' in other words `work
of hands.'
In The Merry Wives of Windsor, ``All his successors (gone before
him) hath done't: and all his ancestors (that come after him) may.''
I.A. Richards (q.v.) was a
hysteron proteron repeat offender; he made a habit of presenting various
claims about subjects before stating what the subjects were. Languages like
Japanese and Classical Latin, in which the verb in a
simple sentence normally follows not only the subject but the object and most
other sentence elements, can seem like prodigies of hysteron proteron
to an English-speaker. I keep repeating the phrase hysteron proteron
instead of using, say, a demonstrative pronoun for the term hysteron
proteron, in an effort to assure that if you do remember the term
hysteron proteron, you won't misremember the second word as the name of
a common subatomic particle.
Vowel harmony only gets you so much.
Herz is the modern German word meaning `heart.' Hertz is an
older spelling of the same word, still common as a surname and a rental car
company. The person honored by the SI unit is Heinrich
Rudolph Hertz. He was the first person to succeed in generating and
detecting the electromagnetic waves predicted by the electromagnetic theory of
James Clerk Maxwell. In the process of doing this work, he observed that his
detector was more sensitive to electromagnetic waves if it was exposed to
UV light. This was the first observation of what is now called the
photoelectric effect.
You may assume infinite ignorance and unlimited intelligence.
kill -1 (that's a one).
![[Phone icon]](icons/phone.gif){kind=icon}
In Casablanca, Claude Rains (as
Captain Louis Renault) asks Bogie (playing Rick Blaine) why he came to
Casablanca.
Blaine: ``My health ... I came to Casablanca for the waters.''
Renault: ``Waters? What waters? We are in the desert.''
Blaine: ``I was misinformed.''
Water dissolving...and water removing
There is water at the bottom of the ocean
UNDER the water
Carry the water
Remove the water from the bottom of the ocean
