O o

When you scan a Spanish document using OCR software that's expecting English, ó is sometimes interpreted as 6, but to the human eye, ó is usually more different from 6 than o is from 0 -- particularly in some of the older fonts that had short numbers.

In many countries of Europe and Latin America, it is standard to write 7 with a small dash through the slanted line. On the other hand, it is also common to write a 1 that looks like a lambda, with the initial upstroke almost as long as the downstroke. In the US, where 1 is usually a simple stroke, the extra dash through the 7 doesn't distintinguish anything except the foreign origin of the writer.

In the early days of automated address recognition, the USPS sponsored an OCR software competition. In an attempt to assure that it was the algorithms and not the training sets that were being compared, the developers were required to use a specified collection of training sets. The results of the competition were significantly affected by the fact that the training sets did not contain crossed sevens, and the test sets did.

A lot of people, like me, also cross their zees (or zeds) when hand printing. I have no idea why. An archaic cross on the ess led to confusion and orthographic change in French.

For a long time, the atomic mass unit was defined as 1/16 of the atomic weight of an O-16 atom. This has been superseded by the C-12 definition, under which the natural isotope distribution of oxygen yields an average mass of 15.9994 or so.

See a bit of cautionary history at the Priestley and Scheele entries.

Associate: Did you find everything you were looking for?
Customer: Well, actually no. I couldn't find ``Brother Where Art Thou.''
A.: It's under O -- ``O Brother, Where Art Thou?''
C.: Oh.

Attempts to map the syntax of English onto the grammatical categories of Latin led to a number of peculiar nineteenth-century distortions. One was the idea that English infinitives could not be split, because Latin infinitives could not be split. Another was the identification of a conceptually fugitive vocative case, identified by this particle.

In most SAE languages, nominative and vocative cases are now indistinguishable. In Modern Greek, though, most men's names ending in sigma drop it in the vocative. Hence, a fellow whose name is Athos is addressed Gia sou, Atho! (`Hello, Athos!')

In Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Alice at one point slips and falls into a pool of tears she cried when she was nine feet tall (chapter two, ``The Pool of Tears''). She has shrunk from holding the White Rabbit's fan, dropping it just in time to avoid oblivion by reductio ad absurdum or something like that. Looking about desperately for help, she sees a relatively large animal...

"Would it be of any use, now," thought Alice, "to speak to this mouse? Everything is so out-of-the-way down here, that I should think very likely it can talk: at any rate there's no harm in trying." So she began: "O Mouse, do you know the way out of this pool? I am very tired of swimming about here, O Mouse!" (Alice thought this must be the right way of speaking to a mouse: she had never done such a thing before, but she remembered having seen in her brother's Latin Grammar, "A mouse--- of a mouse---to a mouse---a mouse---O mouse!")
[Glossarist's aside: that would be nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, and vocative; she forgot ablative.]
The Mouse looked at her rather inquisitively, and seemed to her to wink with one of its little eyes, but it said nothing.

"Perhaps it doesn't understand English," thought Alice; "I daresay it's a French mouse, come over with William the Conqueror." (For, with all her knowledge of history, Alice had no very clear notion how long ago anything had happened.)
[Glossarist's aside: the Norman invasion, and the Battle of Hastings, took place in 1066. It is one of the best remembered dates, if not the best remembered date, in English history. First the ablative, now this. Listen, smarty-pants, I've had just about enough of your carping. Alice is all of seven years and six months old and in a spot of trouble, so cut her some slack, already!]
So she began again: "Où est ma chatte?" which was the first sentence in her French lesson-book. The Mouse gave a sudden leap out of the water, and seemed to quiver all over with fright. "Oh, I beg your pardon!" cried Alice hastily, afraid that she had hurt the poor animal's feelings. "I quite forgot you didn't like cats."

There's a form of spongiform encephalopathy that afflicts mice (see prions entry). One of the symptoms is the loss of their instinctive fear of cat urine.

One of the hits in Jefferson Airplane's second album, ``Surrealistic Pillow'' (1967), is the song ``White Rabbit,'' which includes the line

Go ask Alice, when she's ten feet tall.

Great Society recorded a studio album, produced by of all people Sly Stone before his more famous days as a soul singer, but it wasn't released commercially. Not then. In 1990 (about twenty-five years after the songs were recorded), ``Grace Slick/The Great Society'' was released by the never more aptly named Legacy Records.

Around the time Great Society's recording efforts were faltering, the original Jefferson Airplane album was disappointing as well. Vocalist Signe Toly Anderson became pregnant and (according to this interview) wanted to get her husband away and out of the drug scene, and Jefferson Airplane asked Grace to join them. The rest is history, as they say.

``The Great Society'' was the name of LBJ's activist-government vision. (See, for example, the Head Start entry. Back in those days, it was possible to believe that a little, or maybe more than a little, benevolent government intervention could make a great society. F. Hayek, in the preface to a later American edition of The Road to Serfdom, comments on the very different reaction to his book when it was first published in the US than when it was originally published in Britain (shortly after WWII). He judged that in Europe, the longer experience with activist government made readers, including his opponents, more receptive to the skepticism about socialism that his book represented. In contrast, the US had less of this experience, and the problems were not yet so apparent, so his opponents were more outraged by the suggestion that there would be problems. I'm not sure Hayek's analysis of this reception difference is correct, but there you are.

For more on war, the Anglo-American relationship, and Alice, see the LSJ entry. Nothing on mice, though. It adds a certain poignancy to the classical-language reference above.

Typical materials: TeO₂ (Tellurium Oxide), PbMoO₄, LiNbO₃.

Example of usage:

``With this exciting offer, you can purchase now and not make any payments for 200 years OAC!''

We'll give you these terms if you're a nephew of the boss or an impecunious third-world country.

Since the debts of some third-world nations will never be paid, banks prefer to lend to them on such a long-term basis that by the time the loans have to be declared nonperforming, the approving loan officer has collected all of his pension.

L'AICO in French.

This page on the ear is mostly about OAE's.

Disruptive passengers are an increasing problem. Before you become one, remember: It's cold out there!

Gadhafi's original idea was to change the name to ``African Union.'' Of course, it's not just a name change. More later, after the antiemetic.

A microprocessor or three.

The earliest systems were proprietary, with different plugs and codes for different manufacturers or models. In 1988, the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) set a standard connector plug and set of diagnostic test signals. The EPA adapted most of their standards from the SAE on-board diagnostic programs and recommendations. OBD-II (next entry) is an expanded set of standards and practices developed by SAE and adopted by the EPA and CARB (California Air Resources Board) for implementation by January 1, 1996.

Pascal was named after Blaise Pascal. Oberon was not named after Waugh. Instead, it was named after the moon of Uranus named Oberon. The Voyager 2 space probe was passing by Oberon at the time in 1986 that Wirth conceived his new project. (Modula was created for something called modular programming.)

For a smidgen of useful Oberon information, see its FOLDOC entry. As of this writing, Software--Practice & Experience is only online back to 1997 (that I have access to). The Wikipedia article on Oberon links to gzipped PostScript versions of the articles mentioned above, and some more. In fact there's an Oberon site, served by ETH, which is loaded with Oberon resources. Geometry.net has a good collection of links to documents on Oberon.

 HUGE ND FAN DESPERATE FOR
5 GAs FOR RUTGERS. CALL PAT
(xxx) xxx-xxxx.

[Telephone number left out because, why should I provide free advertising?]

The throw-away line is that obese should be defined as excessively short for one's mass. Garfield the fat cat has described himself as not overweight but undertall. See also body weight entry for new ideas on how to lose weight; less interesting related entry: BMI.

No wait -- I changed my mind: I'll take the second-best offer. Wouldn't want to appear greedy.

If you don't set a time limit on when you will stop accepting offers and select one, OBO only effectively means that you'll consider lower offers.

Common usage: ``or OBO.'' Don't believe me?

The transitive verb obrar in Spanish has some of the same senses as the English word work (to work metal or miracles), but the transitive and especially the intransitive verb seem to have a broader range of acepciones. E.g. obrar el bien, `to do good'; obrar libremente, `to act [or operate] freely'; la carta obra en sus manos, `the letter is in his hands.'

Obrero translates almost perfectly to `worker,' as in a factory or a hive, (female form obrera). It's also used apositively: sindicato obrero is `labor union.'

What is the value of all the as one might call it's scattered through the pages of Brooks? If it is Brooks who is calling it this or that, the interpolation is totally unnecessary; if, on the other hand, it is someone else, the author ought to tell us who. What is the explanation of the statement, in connection with Charles Eliot Norton, that ``his field was of imagination all compact''? If the sentence is Brooks's sentence, he ought not to load it down with this antique cliché; if the opinion is that of some previous critic, the cliché was not worth preserving. Who is it who exclaims of Francis Parkman, ``Eccovi, this child has been in hell''? Mr. Brooks pointing up his picture with a familiar literary allusion or some Bostonian¹ addicted to Dante? ...

----
1. We have a footnote entry.

Leon Trotsky had a nonobvious insight into the nature of obviousness. It is recorded by Joseph Hansen in the introduction to the English version of My Life (discussed at the Faux-Pas-Bidet subentry):

     He [Trotsky] was excellent at dictation, pacing himself according to the speed of the stenographer, whose strokes, hooks and curves he occasionally paused to admire; but dictation offered only some relief since he proceeded by successive approximations, going over his manuscripts repeatedly. "Sometimes," he told me once, "the most obvious thought comes only after the last draft is finished." The "last draft" was then reworked.

The usual joke about what is obvious has a math professor interrupted in mid-lecture by a student asking for the explanation of some assumption. The professor pauses to consider in silence, and after scratching his beard for twenty minutes, says ``it's obvious.''

In another version of this story, the professor interrupts himself. For a further nontrivial insight, see the trivial entry.

One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about human beings was their habit of continually stating and repeating the obvious, as in It's a nice day, or You're very tall, or Oh dear you seem to have fallen down a thirty-foot well, are you alright? At first Ford had formed a theory to account for this strange behaviour. If human beings don't keep exercising their lips, he thought, their mouths probably seize up. After a few months' consideration and observation he abandoned this theory in favour of a new one. If they don't keep on exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working. After a while he abandoned this one as well as being obstructively cynical and decided he quite liked human beings after all, but he always remained desperately worried about the terrible number of things they didn't know about.

OBX is a chain of barrier islands along the Atlantic coast, screening the northeast quarter or so of the North Carolina coast. It includes Kitty Hawk, so basically it's hallowed ground.

Disclaimer: none of this information is very recent, or based on direct personal experience. If you want reliable information, visit your local family planning clinic. Take a mace when you go.

This is correct to the extent of omitting any mention of occupation in the sense of paid employment. In fact, an interesting division of semantic field has occurred. Occupational therapy is essentially rehabilitation of the hands and arms, and physical therapy is rehabilitation of legs, feet, and back.

What? You say can't pull yourself away from the terminal? Okay, look at this site. Also this item at OMIM.

My friend Lou, an administrator of mental-health services, explained to me recently that most of the soft mental-health syndromes (not schizophrenia or bipolar disorder or clinical depression or stuff like that, you understand) are simply pathologizations of behaviors that in other circumstances are regarded as virtues. The example I remember best is that OCD is just a pejorative way to say ``detail-oriented.''

`Late Antiquity', the period between approximately 250 and 750 CE, witnessed massive cultural and political changes: the emergence of the world's great monotheistic religions, rabbinic Judaism, Christianity, and Islam; the development, and eventual destruction, of the Sasanian empire, the last Persian empire of Antiquity; the Germanic conquest and settlement of the western Roman empire; the transformation of Byzantium into a militarised and christianised society. The world of 750 was radically different from the world of 250, and the legacy of the changes that had occurred is very much with us today -- from European states tracing their origins to Germanic invaders, to the cultural divide brought about by the rise of Islam.

Oxford University has over 60 senior scholars, and a very large number of graduate students, researching within the field of Late Antiquity, with specialisms that embrace all the disciplines, from Archaeology to Theology, and that cover the entire geographical spectrum of the late antique world, from Coptic Egypt and Sasanian Iran, to the Celtic North. Recently these scholars have been united in the Oxford Centre for Late Antiquity (OCLA), hosted by the Oxford History Faculty. The aim of OCLA is to foster dialogue between the scholarly disciplines, and between the many institutions of the world that study Late Antiquity.

Judging from the images on the homepage, they specialize in the study of people with big hair. (Not that there's anything wrong with that!)

Although I have seen the OCT acronym used elsewhere, the OCT's own website refers consistently to ``the College'' and ``l'Ordre.''

An Ontario teacher recently explained the organization for me in four words, and the word evil appeared twice in his definition. I got to wondering how a representative professional organization could generate such feelings, and I discovered that

``[m]embers of the College elect 17 of the 31 members [of its Council]. The remaining 14 members of Council are public representatives appointed by the provincial government. Council meetings are open to the public.''

Gas stations and pumps in Canada display the same number (PON) as in the US. In Europe the RON is typically shown. The RON value of a fuel is usually higher than the MON value by about 8-10 for gasoline, so the same fuel sold in Europe has a nominal octane rating higher by 4-5.

Perkin-Elmer offers to help you determine both.

I'm not sure which name it has, but the original method (probably RON) approved by the ASTM in 1934 defines octane number as the octane percentage by volume of a heptane-octane blend with anti-knock characteristics equivalent to the gasoline under test. The particular alkanes in the blend are specified to be n-heptane and iso-octane (2,2,4-trimethylpentane). Of course, different tests give different meanings to the word ``equivalent.'' The devil is in that detail. To complicate matters further, in 1956 the ASTM extended the scale to octane numbers above 100 by the use of iso-octane fortified with tetraethyl lead [the use of which has been illegal for decades now, with verified decreases in human lead (Pb) levels]. I think that RON and MON are currently defined by ASTM D 2699 and ASTM D 2700, resp.

At Dan and Ilana's wedding, another friend of Dan's told me he worked in gasoline testing, but he couldn't explain RON or MON. He just reads the numbers off the machine (that'd be the ASTM 2885 method). It turns out that both numbers are obtained by running a specified test engine with the fuel under test, but that for RON the engine is run at lower speed, resulting in a higher octane number.

When John Fogerty sang CCR's cover of ``Proud Mary,'' (for the album ``Bayou Country'') he didn't understand the original song lyrics and sang ``pumped a lot of pain down in New Orleans.'' When Ike and Tina Turner did their half-nicccce...an'easy, half-rough version, Tina restored the original lyric:

pumped a lotta 'tane down in New Orleans

Anyway, that's the story I heard on the radio. The only problem with that theory, as has been pointed out to me, is that John Fogerty wrote ``Proud Mary.'' Well then, he misheard the 'tane expression, used it in the song, but then Tina sang true to the colloquialism: a case of reverse mondegreen.

Don't like that? Okay, here's another theory: John Fogerty meant pain, because he was talking about pumping iron. You know -- ``No pain, no gain.''

Wait, wait! Here's a reasonable theory: he used the homophone 'pane, meaning propane. People really use this contraction (testimony here).

What does John Fogerty think about all these theories? The net has an answer. According to radio personality Ken Hoffman,

I've been having an ongoing debate with a friend about the words to Proud Mary. He thinks the lyrics go, "Cleaned a lot of plates in Memphis, pumped a lot of `tane down in New Orleans." He says 'tane is short for octane, meaning the writer was pumping gas. One night I heard Jay Leno say the same thing.

Here's the correct lyric, straight from the writer John Fogerty:

"Sometimes I write words to songs because they sound cool to sing. Sometimes the listener doesn't understand what I'm singing because I'm dedicated to singing the vowel, having fun with the word sounds coming out of my mouth. `Cleaned a lot of plates in Memphis, pumped a lot of pain down in New Orleans,' is a good example. I think Tina Turner sang `tane' instead of `pain,' as in a contracted form of octane. But I knew what she meant," Fogerty said.

A likely story.

This entry is a bit rough right now, but it may be a while before I have a chance to come back and sand it down, and in the meantime it's holding up publication of the rest of the file. Sorry.

Quoting from Edward Frederic Obert's Internal Combustion Engine, (International Textbook Co., Scranton, Pa., 1968 3/e), p. 304:

The unknown octane rating of a test fuel is determined in the following manner: The engine [a standard one-cylinder model especially for testing] is operated with the test fuel, and the air-fuel ratio adjusted for maximum knock. The compression ratio is then varied until the knock intensity is standard (55 units). With the compression ratio locked at this setting, known blends of reference fuels are placed in the two auxiliary carburetor bowls. Each fuel is tested in turn, and the knockmeter readings are recorded. Eventually the original knockmeter reading (of 55) will be bracketed by two readings from two known reference fuels. One blend will have a higher octane number than the unknown sample, and the second blend will have a lower number (but the difference is restricted to about two octane numbers, since the knockmeter is nonlinear). Linear interpolation of the knockmeter readings for the three fuels is then made to find the octane rating of the sample of unknown fuel.

RON and MON are both measured with the same standard engine. The principal difference is that RON is measured with the test engine running at 600 RPM, and MON with the test engine running at 900 RPM. Also, the inlet temperature is 325K for RON and 422K for MON.

Octane ratings above 100 are obtained from comparisons with leaded isooctane.) I suppose linear extrapolation is stretched a bit to determine the octane numbers of n-octane (RON=-20, MON=-17).

Rules of thumb regarding how octane numbers (RON and MON) vary with molecular structure:
1. For unbranched, noncyclic alkanes (n-alkanes), octane number decreases with increasing chain length.
2. Increasing the mass of an alkane by lengthening any of its existing chains (as opposed to replacing one of its hydrogens with a methyl group, say), also decreases octane number.
3. For any fixed number of carbon atoms, increasing the number of side chains increases the octane number.
4. Ring structures (cycloalkanes and aromatics) have higher octane numbers.
5. Double bonds (alkenes) increase octane number.

As it happens, eight bits is also a dollar.

Also oculo dextro, because the Romans inflected noun phrases so you could tell an attributive noun even when the noun it modified was far away or even missing.

Anaximander had a theory that the Earth was shaped like a cylinder, with height three times the diameter. The rest of the entry was written under the assumption that people live on the sides of the cylinder. This is pretty stupid, because (a) even the Greeks eventually realized that the Earth is round, and (b) if people lived on the sides, they'd slide down. In Anaximander's model, people live on the flat top surface of the Earth, but I can't be bothered to rewrite the rest of this entry. Here's how it stood before I discovered my stupid error.

You're bound to wonder about the North Star: is it a disc, or how does one see it if one isn't at the top of the cylinder? It's not such a problem: the 3-by-1 dimensions were standard for column drums, so I guess he had in mind something like a cylinder tapered towards the top, like a column. After all, he obviously couldn't have thought it was perfectly smooth either (could he?). I know, I know: now you want to know about the night sky: how is it possible that such a large region of the sky around the North Star could have been visible (in Winter) at times half a day apart? Look, Anaximander lived in the sixth century BCE -- this wasn't half bad for the time. I'm so glad that you've had an opportunity to ask all your questions.

In Anaximander's theory, the Sun was set in a wheel with dimensions 27 and 28. It's not entirely clear what those numbers meant: Anaximander's book or books are lost, and we have these numbers from third parties. That's as bad as getting your news from the MSM, but before the Internet there were no real alternatives. In chapter 4 of his Anaximander and the Architects: The Contributions of Egyptian and Greek Architectural Technologies on the Origins of Greek Philosophy (Albany: SUNY Press, 2001), Robert Hahn argues that these are radius rather than (as usually assumed) diameter dimensions, so Anaximander's Sun wheel has an o.d. of 56 Earth diameters and i.d. of 54.

Sources pass along a ``19'' for the Moon wheel, so at least he guessed it was closer. It's usually assumed that this 19 corresponds to the Sun's 28, so if you suppose that these are diameters, the Moon wheel has an i.d. of 36 Earth diameters. The stars are set in a cylinder inside the Moon wheel. (You weren't going to ask why we don't see stars against the dark side of the Moon were you? Good, because the answer is obvious: the reflected light of the Earth makes the dark crescent of the Moon so bright that it outshines the stars, just as the daytime atmosphere does. See, everything is easy if you have faith.) The standard conjecture is that the cylinder of stars, and the wheels carrying the Moon and Sun, formed a nice arithmetic progression; according to Hahn's view, that gives the star cylinder an o.d. and i.d. of 19 and 18, respectively.

According to a presentation at the 1941 ODC Annual Meeting, more than 2,000 drilling contractors were operating in the US. There were about 4,000 rotary and 2,800 cable rigs available, and contractors owned about three-quarters of them. There's been tremendous consolidation, with far fewer independent contractors today.

Wells have also been getting progressively deeper. In 1859, in the face of some ridicule, Col. Edwin Drake drilled for oil near Titusville, Pennsylvania, and hit it at a depth of 59 feet, 8 inches. That was the first commercial oil well in the world, producing 35 barrels a day. (Pennsylvania was the first major oil-producing state. That's why a major brand of motor oil is called Quaker State.) Most early wells were shallower than 400 feet. The average well depth was about 3000 feet by 1941 and, according to the IPAA, 5572 feet in 2001. But average doesn't tell the whole story -- many modern wells are deeper than 25,000 feet. (You want metric units? Very well, a foot equals exactly 30.48 cm. ``Do the math,'' as they say.)

Generally speaking, increasing depth has meant a shift in basic drilling technology. Col. Drake used a cable rig: basically, this was an iron bit at the end of a cable. The bit functions as a ram: it is repeatedly raised by the cable and dropped. Drake's cable was pulled by a steam engine, and over time that was replaced by different motors. In principle, cable rigs can reach great depths -- a record of 11,145 feet was set by New York drillers in 1953 -- but efficiency decreases with depth. The alternative, and by far the most common kind of rig today, is the rotary rig.

The 1901 discovery of ``Spindletop'' oil field, on a salt dome near Beaumont, Texas, was taken as proof of the value of rotary drilling rigs, and popularized the use of drilling mud. As the numbers from the 1941 ODC meeting show, the gradual supplanting of cable rigs by rotary rigs was well along by 1940. Rotary rigs are basically drills: a long cylindrical tube (gradually lowered through the derrick and periodically extended by the addition of sections) transmits torque to a bit at the end. The bit can be a pretty ornery-looking device, decorated with toothed gears. The tube or ``drill string'' also serves to carry drilling mud down to the bit. The drilling mud (a mix of clay, water, and chemical additives) cools and lubricates the bit, and is recirculated by being forced up the borehole on the outside of the drill string. As it rises, it carries up rock cuttings. The cuttings are sieved out and the mud recirculated. (Sometimes the opposite circulation direction is used.) Rotary rigs have better hole-cleaning properties than cable rigs, and can transmit greater power to the bit.

In basketball, most defenses are some variation of either man-to-man or zone (there are also ``junk defenses''). The zones are normally two, three, or four areas of the court surrounding the defended basket, and the zones deform a bit as the ball moves around. In an odd-front zone [defense], the outermost zone has one defender or three. In an even-front zone, the outermost zone has two (or four, who knows?) defenders. I wouldn't know a basketball from a large grapefruit, but according to the Internet, most teams attack an odd front zone with an even number front.

``Be My Baby,'' by Ronnie Spector, was a hit for the Ronnettes (oh-- is that where the name came from?). It included the lyric, ``For every kiss you give me / I'll give you three.'' I always found that theoretically challenging. Let's experiment!

Here's a project in History ODL. Here's a tendentiously acronymed ODL project from Finland. The Institute of [for] Educational Technology at an Open University in the UK is big on this stuff. Also visit the United States Distance Learning Association (USDLA).

Why do these things happen to a guy with such a good chin and never a bad hair day? The answer was revealed in a special four-cleavages-on-the-cover issue of the weekly newsmagazine People. Chris O'Donnell, the prep school boy, is named one of the ten best dressed of 1995, along with Nicole Kidman, Oprah Winfrey, Cindy Crawford, Serena Linley, Marcia Clark (``best-dressed on a budget''), Jodie Foster and Elizabeth Hurley. Professional transvestite RuPaul gushes ``[h]e's so adorable.'' ``His mother must be very proud,'' Linda Dano declares. Cruel praise. One member of the best-dressed advisory panel costumed him for Batman Forever, but appears not to have recused himself from the decision, despite the evident motive for mischief.

Clearly, we have no Mickey Rourke here. And as Mickey Rourke once told an interviewer for Smart magazine:

``Every once in a while you've gotta roll the potato.''

``You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think.''

Food for thought, probably.

A casting atrocity: O'Donnell as Hemingway!

[The purple-tights image link is to a locally mirrored copy of <http://wuarchive.wustl.edu/multimedia/images/gif/b/batman-a.gif>.]

The two-letter form is also used for traditional reasons in the spelling of some names. For example, the surname of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is never spelled Göthe, except perhaps in jest or profound ignorance, though there are individuals who spell their own surname that way. Similarly, the common surname Schröder is written Schroeder when necessary, and most German immigrants to the US with that name seem to have adopted the oe spelling. In addition, however, there are Germans in Germany who regularly spell their surname Schroeder, and their numbers perhaps ammount to as much as 5% of the Schröder population.

Not entirely relevant, but worth knowing, is that in Goethe's own pronunciation, the oe sounded little like the ö/oe of standard modern German. It's not due to the two centuries of language evolution so much as to the fact that he used his own local dialect.

The association of oe with ö is apparently not arbitrary. My mother was taught in school in Germany, some time ago, that originally only oe was used, and that the ö is an abbreviated representation of this: the dieresis over the o represents the two vertical slashes made in writing an e (in the traditional Gothic script).

There are compound words in which oe represents two vowels. The typical example is a compound like soeben [so + eben].

The oe is also used to represent the ø. I don't know whether the ø replaced or arose as another short form of oe. It's also possible that ø is associated with oe indirectly through ö. See the Oerberg entry for why that might be.

One last thing: if you can't make an ö, it's a favor to no one if you write o with a double quote in any form or position. It's painful ugly. Please, just use the oe and have done.

You know, I should group these last three entries together, using {Oklahoma | Omaha | Oregon} in the definition. But if I did that, my leisure-time work product would decrease by two units, and my nominal relaxation efficiency would decrease even as I increased hobby effort. But I need a better excuse than that. A better excuse is that there are probably other OEA's with expansions beginning in OL or ON that aren't education associations, and we should be prepared.

You're probably wondering why these organizations don't have an entry between the Omaha and Oregon Education Associations (OEA and OEA, respectively). The reason is, if I did that, the comment in the OEA entry above wouldn't make any sense.

The Ontario Expropriation Association ``is a non-profit, voluntary association of professionals having an interest in the field of expropriation law and practice.'' Emphasis on the word voluntary, I guess. ``Membership in the OEA includes lawyers, appraisers, planners, accountants, and others from both the private and public sectors. The association also includes members of the Ontario Municipal Board, and the Judiciary.''

As for the Energy Association, they are ``where energy idea and actions converge.'' The idea I get from their homepage image is that they want to extract energy from lightning to make lighting.

Twenty-nine members currently: Austria, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece (this country needs a better name -- something dignified to go with its great history, not a homophone of grease), Hungary, Iceland (cool!), Ireland (calm down!), Italy, Japan, Republic of Korea, Luxembourg, Mexico (Mexico?), Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States.

The (OE)² is a project of the MI at WMU. As of July 2002, the plural ``Editions'' is still prospective.

A common practice in Germanic languages is to print or type oe for ö or ø when either of the latter is not available. (For a bit more on that, see the this oe entry.) When the relevant extension of the Roman alphabet is available, and in handwriting, the use of the two-letter equivalent is generally regarded as incorrect; the principal exceptions are surnames. Many people prefer to have their names written in a traditional form. (A similar thing occurs in Japanese, and it is the main source of the demand for printable kanji characters eliminated from standard use by the government.) Anyway, although the earliest editions of the Lingua Latina books used in the US bore his surname in the form Oerberg, later editions give the name as Ørberg, so that presumably is the form he prefers. Since the books make a strong effort to avoid showing any language other than Latin, I'm surprised I haven't seen a more Latinized version of his name anywhere (though writing oe for ø is a start).

German and Swedish use ö (called ``umlaut o'' in German and called by its pronunciation in Swedish) but not ø. Danish and Norwegian use ø but not ö. When Danish or Norwegian words written with an ø have close cognates in Swedish (and they often do) the cognates are written with ö. The converse (ö in Swedish typically mapping to ø in Danish and Norwegian cognates) is also true. Consequently, the two graphemes are often regarded as functionally equivalent (we won't talk about pronunciation), and one is sometimes substituted for the other when that is all that is available. At least, in English texts, one often finds ö substituted for ø. For example, in a typescript Introduction to Lingua Latina (it's mentioned toward the end of that LL entry), the author's surname is written Örberg.

Here's some instructional material from Virginia Tech.

Here I sit,
All broken-hearted
Paid a dime to ____
But only ______.

You wanted more graceful transitions in the previous paragraph? What do you think this is -- literature?

A-driver's-license-and-car is babe-bait in high school and in retirement communities. In the former, parents may impose a curfew; in the latter, the state division of motor vehicles may impose a no-driving-after-dark restriction.

I understand that after an initial IFFT, a ``cyclic prefix'' is slapped on the front, which is just a repeat of the end of the transformed signal, and that this makes decoding easy, and that another advantage of OFDM is that it's possible to design for ``bad spots'' in the frequency spectrum. The downside includes high peak-to-average power ratio, and the need for precise linearity in the amplifiers and very sharp frequency syncronization. Don't quote me on that, though -- the speaker intensity at the talk I attended on this stuff was fading into the air conditioner noise (white, Carrier), and the overheads were not easy to decode.

[Vice President Dick Cheney's] office, oddly, or nervously, or defensively, refuses to supply a daily schedule of his recent activities, and, furthermore, makes this refusal off the record. (Truly--a spokesperson refused to provide information only under the condition that I agreed not to say she refused to provide information.)

I suppose she must have threatened to refuse to refuse to provide the information unless he agreed not to reveal her refusal. I think Wolff struck a bad bargain here, and it's not even clear that he honored the confidentiality agreement. It probably depends on the precise wording. What the nonspokesperson should have done was provide the lack of information on a recursive conditional basis. The reporter would have had to agree not to report any off-the-record information, with the stipulation that any information about off-the-record information (including but not limited to the conditions under which it might be reported) would be considered off-the-record information itself. One shudders to think what stick could correspond to such an indigestible carrot. One also wonders about the topology of such an uninformative information set. This set might have a hole in its interior: is it permissible not to report the daily schedule one hasn't been given, or is this tantamount to suggesting that one hasn't received the schedule?

Here's a less convoluted situation, but one with a little more emotional weight. It's from a Washington Post story of June 20, 2007, reporting the continuation of a ban on the use of BlackBerrys in French government ministries and the presidential palace. (After all, BlackBerry data are routed through servers in the UK and the US; the NSA may be listening.)

An Orange France spokesman said Wednesday that the company had no comment on the government's decision to banish the BlackBerry from the corridors and offices of government because of security concerns. The spokesman, however, pleaded not to be named declining to comment.

RIM, the Canadian company that makes the BlackBerry, says messages sent via BlackBerrys are super-duper secure (not an exact quote). Of course, they have to say that. The question is, what are they not telling us, and what are they not telling us that they're not telling us? Check out the non-denial denial entry also, but don't tell 'em I sentcha.

• Province of Assumption B.V.M. (US Midwest)
• Bosnia
• Custody of the Holy Land
• Province of Holy Name (US Northeast)
• Province of Immaculate Conception (US Northeast)
• Province of Our Lady of Guadalupe (US Southwest) [This link is probably dead by now, since it was scheduled to move to Catholic University of America when I made this entry.]
• Province of Sacred Heart (US Midwest)
• Custody of St. Anthony of Padua (Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei)
• St. John the Baptist Province (Ohio, USA)
• Province of St. Paul the Apostle (Malta)

Niagara: Cumberland Falls (in Whitley County, Kentucky)
Grand Canyon: Breaks Canyon
William Shakespeare: William Faulkner

See also our FSU entry. (F is for Florida, SU is for Soviet Union, and X is for the People's Republic of Berkeley.)

Cf. NGC.

The OGC sits at the top of a hill, on the far side of a golf course from the main undergraduate campus. On a misty morning, coming into Princeton on the train spur from Princeton Junction, the most prominent sight off to the west is the OGC's Cleveland Tower, rising like an upscale Brigadoon in central New Jersey. More than one person claims to have felt disoriented by the sight.

The Villanova Center for Information Law and Policy serves a page of Ohio state government links. USACityLink.com has a page with some city and town links for the state.

The song ``My City was Gone'' first appeared on the Pretenders' album Learning to Crawl. It was written by lead singer Chrissie Hynde, a native of Akron, Ohio, after she returned from a long stay in Britain. The song ends

Ay, oh, where did you go, Ohio?

The spectral classification sequence categorizes the light spectra of stars. The system was developed by E. C. Pickering, director of the Harvard College Observatory from 1877 to 1919, a time when it was dark at night across most of the US and it wasn't ridiculous to operate a professional astronomical observatory in coastal Massachusetts. Back when there were competing spectral classifications (due to Secchi and Vogel), Pickering's system was known as the Harvard system or the Henry Draper system. Henry Draper was a benefactor of the observatory.

Pickering's system is based not on the color of the star, but on the relative absorption of a sequence of pairs of absorption lines. Thus, as one moves along the main sequence from B to A (i.e.: B0, B1, B2, ... B9, A0) the relative absorption of helium lines decreases and the hydrogen absorption lines become more prominent.

A nice description is served on this page.

High German is a division of West Germanic. West Germanic is one of three main divisions of the Germanic language family, which in turn is one of a dozen or so major divisions of the Indo-European language family. The other two main Germanic branches are North Germanic, otherwise known as Scandinavian, and East Germanic. The East Germanic tribes migrated from the Baltic and settled around the Black Sea by the fourth century. Then came Attila. Someday if you're good I won't tell you the story. It's very exciting, and it doesn't have a very happy ending.

West Germanic includes Anglo-Saxon and its descendants (including English, a language you may be aware of), Frisian, Dutch, and related languages, and the two language groups Low and High German. Some time around 500 A.D., a sound shift occurred in OHG that still distinguishes Hochdeutsch (the more precise term for German from other West Germanic families.

The Low German branch of West Germanic has surviving members, such as Plattdeutsch, among the various local languages of modern Germany. But High German is the ancestor of standard German, and historically, most German literature has been written in OHG or one of its descendant languages. German literature is thus divided into three periods. Old High German (800 A.D. to 1050), Middle High German (1050-1500), and New High German (1500 to present)

Yes, yes, you're thinking of Violet, George and Mary Bailey's childhood friend in It's A Wonderful Life. She says, ``Oh, this ol' thing? I only wear this when I don't care how I look.'' The Violet character's best line, m.A.n., is uttered by the actress playing her as a child in an early scene. Coming into Mr. Gower's drugstore, she meets the little Mary Hatch,

Mary: I love [George].
Violet: Me too!
Mary: [But] you love all the boys!
Violet: What's wrong with that?

Look, what I'm trying to say here is, most people have an unconscious mind that would blow out their conscious mind in any fair test of intelligence, see? The conscious mind gets all the publicity only because it's out in front. Cool, no? Anyway, practice the head term until it rolls off your tongue like some bad meat you ate an hour ago, and you can sound spontaneous too.

The h in the German noun Ohm is silent -- it only serves to indicate that the o is long (in terms of vowel quantity). In Greek, the distinction is made by using different vowels omega and omicron, as the names imply.

Greek does not have a letter aitch. The capital eta looks like H, but it's just a vowel. When Greek is written in Roman characters, aitches are inserted to represent aspiration. Specifically, th, ph, and ch transliterate the Greek letters theta, phi, and chi, which in Greek represent the aspirated versions of the unvoiced stops tau, pi, and kappa, respectively. (We do the same thing with voiced stops in Hindi: bh, dh, gh.) Vowels and rho can also be aspirated, but there aren't separate letters for the aspirated versions. Instead, the characters for the unaspirated sounds are augmented by a breathing mark. (The breathing mark, also called spiritus asper in Latin, looks like a tiny left parenthesis mark above the letter.) Thus, the Greek words that we write hero and rhetor look like ero and retor with specks of ink or screen phosphor along the top. As you can see, the aitch indicating aspiration is usually written after the aspirated sound in Roman characters, but before the aspirated vowel. However, when a Greek word begins with an aspirated diphthong (as in haima, `blood'), the breathing mark is placed over the second vowel.

Well, I was trying to build to something. I was going to mention that vowels in Greek were only aspirated (or at least only got aspiration marks) at the beginning of a word. (This makes it a bit like English, which now has lost word-final aspiration -- it occurs only in foreign loans like Bach and loch -- and limited intervocalic aspiration.) Then I was going to bring in the microohm, and, like a soufflé, this Greek concoction would rise and yield mÔ! Or mo' or something. (I don't like soufflé.) But alas, as often happens, the ingredients didn't come together quite right and, deflatedly, I must simply ask you to proceed now to the mho entry.

At first blush, English appears unusual in having a compound to fill this semantic slot, but that is mainly appearances. Dutch has zonder. (And Dutch zonde is `sin,' so zonder zonde is `sinless.') This zonder is cognate with, and sounds a lot like, the German word sonder. The original senses of the word included `outside' (i.e., `without'), and considering that that is the sense of some Indic cognates (like reconstructed Old Indic sanu-tar), there seems to be some parallel reasoning going on here. Sonder (also sunder) accumulated some related meanings, such as `for each,' and now the main sense of the adjective (and adverb) is `separate(ly).' This all seems very reasonable if one meditates on the related senses of ``outside of'' and ``apart from'' in English. In fact, the outside notion just won't die. The Swedish adverb ut has about the same meaning as its English cognate `out,' utan expresses `without.' The Danish is uden. For Spanish and some other Romance, see sin.

Automobile engines are almost all four-stroke engines. Hand-held chainsaws, lawn mowers, boats with outboard engines, motorcycles, and snowmobiles all traditionally used two-stroke engines. The principal advantage of a two-stroke engine is that you get one power stroke per cylinder per revolution of the crankshaft, rather than one every two revolutions. This means that roughly, you only need half as many cylinders and you have a lighter engine. Two-strokes are also lighter because they're simpler. The earliest designs had no valves, just inlet and outlet openings on the side of the cylinder, closed by the side of the piston. Later designs improved operation slightly with reed valves -- one-way valves that do not require actuation (so no cams, etc.). Some two-strokes do have valves at the top of the cylinder, but I don't know anything about their actuation.

The philosophical disadvantage of two-strokes is that they're sloppy: they squeeze the four operations of compression, power, exhaust, and intake into just two strokes (one complete turn of the crankshaft). This means that you're adding fuel-air mix as you're removing combusted fuel from the same cylinder, so some fuel is wasted: being exhausted immediately as it is let in. Fuel injection gets around this, since fuel can be injected just before spark, and that approach has also been tried. In any case, there are many kinds of inefficiency, and carrying a heavier, harder-to-repair engine may not be worth slightly greater fuel efficiency.

In practice, many other factors influence fuel efficiency, and fuel pass-through is not even the most important cause of hydrocarbon (unburnt fuel) emissions now. Nevertheless, with the exception of hand-held chainsaws, the two-stroke applications listed earlier are moving toward four-stroke. The main practical advantage is vastly reduced noise.

The first part of the term is derived from the Greek oîkos, `house, dwelling.' Other English terms with the same root tend to be based on the Latinized root form oeco-, and the initial oe has generally eroded to e (as in foetus > fetus). In fact, the only common words I can think of that have the root are economy and ecology, and derivationally related words. (According to the OED, oecology was modeled on oeconomy.) The Greek original of that word, oikonomia, essentially had to do with household management. [For a really thorough discussion of the semantic evolution of the word economy in English, see the beginning of Moses Finley's The Ancient Economy (Un. of Calif. Pr., 1973).] In German, economy is Ökonomie. (The umlauted character represents oe.) The word Ökonomie shares the semantic field of economy with the more common Wirtschaft. (The distinction doesn't line up with that of economy and finance. Look, this is the oicotype entry. Wait until we have a dedicated Ökonomie entry, or look in a German dictionary.)

By now you're eager to know how oicotype happens to be spelled the way it is. The reason is probably that the word was introduced by a Swede, Carl Wilhelm von Sydow. See Selected Papers on Folklore, ed. Laurits Bødker (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1948).