R r

                ____        NH
               /    \      /  2
              /      \____/
            HN            \
              \            \
               \            === O
                === NH     /
               /          /
              /         HO
           H N
            2

Réaumur's scale is clearly superior to the others, for three reasons:

1. It can describe the greatest range of temperatures with just two digits.
2. It is conceptually less challenging.
3. It has just the right amount of funkiness -- not too much (°F), not too little (°C).

The recommendation for J is ``Juliette.'' Perhaps you missed it when you were reading the jays.

The piece name Rook is derived from Persian. It's etymologically unrelated to the word rook meaning crow or someone who acts like a crow.

The whole game came to Europe from Persia. The name Chess itself comes from Shah (more evident in German, where chess is called Schach).

Learn more at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.

Quintilian, trying to praise Seneca, but not too highly, remarks that

Seneca had many excellent qualities, a quick and fertile intelligence with great industry and wide knowledge, though as regards the last quality he was often led into error by those whom he had entrusted with the task of investigating certain subjects on his behalf.

Traditionally, star catalogs are ordered by right ascension, whereas Sears catalogs are ordered by people distant from population centers. You could look them up as they rise. (I mean the stars. The sky ones.) Of course, if you're not using a tracking mechanism, the easiest way to locate most stars is relative to the constellations (q.v.) they are part of or near to.

See also the Automobile Association (AA).

All French dictionaries I have checked give only an uncountable or collective racaille, and no countable individual use such as is now current in English. Intrigued by a November 2005 editorial in English that claimed en passant that racaille means `hoodlum,' I searched for uses of the lexeme in French news articles. It seems that the majority of uses are still uncountable (i.e., as described in dictionaries) or at least ambiguous (e.g., attributive uses of the singular form, which might be interpreted as countable or not.) However, a countable form applicable to individuals -- perhaps originally slang -- is becoming evident. In a July 2005 article in Le Télégram, a proud mother is quoted remarking that her daughter's success in school ``prouve que le cliché `gosses de HLM = racailles' n'est pas fondé.'' (Only the quotation marks have been changed to protect the innocent. This means ``proves that the stereotype `kids from the projects = hoodlums' is unfounded.'')

The earliest instance I can find is from 1994 (this mostly reflects the limitations of my database): ``Blues des racailles'' was the debut album of Tonton David, described as having ``origines banlieusardes.'' The last phrase can be translated literally as `suburban origins,' but if you're thinking whitebread and lawn-mowers, you need to have a look at the entry for jeunes des banlieues.

There were riots in the Lille area on Christmas Eve 1998, and among those charged in connection with it were three adults with prior criminal records. Their prosecutor told the court, ``Ce sont trois voyous, trois racailles.'' [`They are three thugs, three hoodlums.'] In a phrase that would resonate in 2005, Le Figaro described Roubaix as having ``un calme précaire,'' (`a fragile calm').

I don't think so.

Any individual unit of rack-mountable equipment is sold in a chassis with a firmly attached front panel, all designed to take up a whole number of U's of vertical space, and the entire width inside the rack. One mounts the equipment onto a rack by screwing the front panel to the front sides of two rails. (In the equipment I'm familiar with, the front panel is typically a steel sheet one sixteenth to one eighth of an inch thick.) Various elaborations of this system are used, particularly for heavy equipment, involving vertical rails at the back (see U entry). Regardless of these additional support mechanisms, the front panels have standard dimensions which allow them to be firmly mounted on the rails. At least twelve panel specifications are designated by letter names:

Panel Size	Height in whole U's
A	1
B	2
C	3
D	4
E	5
F	6
G	7
H	8
J	9
K	10
L	11
M	12

But Harry Morgan, who played the unit commander (Col. Sherman T. Potter) on M*A*S*H from 1975 to the end, really was the same actor who played Jack Webb's partner on the 1967-1970 Dragnet series. He also played a crazy general named Steele in a 1974 episode of M*A*S*H.

A palindrome, how 'bout that!

Invented in Britain in 1940 by Robert M. Page and others, and independently in Germany. The name was coined by S. M. Tucker.

During the war, Britain sent its developers to work in the US on rapid roll-out. Through the course of the war, there was time enough for a couple of generations of measures and countermeasures to be developed, what we now call ECM. In the course of research, it was unexpectedly discovered that microwaves didn't travel as far in humid weather -- a fact that led to development of the microwave oven. The research was conducted at the MIT Radiation Laboratory (``Rad Lab''), which was disbanded before the war ended. The lab name is often described as having been purposely chosen to be deceptive, but it's hardly inaccurate.

Text copied February 2005: ``The RADAR Network, sponsored by SAMHSA's NCADI, is the largest substance abuse prevention and treatment network of its kind. There are more than 700 active Centers worldwide with representation in every State and U.S. territory.

This unique network offers free membership and provides an organized way for States to connect with one another and with national agencies such as the Center for Substance Abuse Prevention (CSAP), the National Association of State Alcohol and Drug Abuse Directors (NASADAD), and the National Prevention Network (NPN).

In practice, almost any capacitor package that is not a box and has two leads not in an ``axial'' configuration is liable to be called ``radial.'' The usage even extends to those bright oblong capacitors whose correct technical designation I believe to be orange drop.

Here's a toy code to convert between different radices.

``Hexadecimal'' is one of those bastard ``New Latin'' or ``international scientific vocabulary'' words (ISV), half-Latin (-decimal) and half-Greek (hexa-) like automobile, television and electrocute.

See C. R. Cook and P. S. P. Wang, ``A Chomsky hierarchy of isotonic array grammars and languages,'' Computer Graphics and Image Processing, vol. 8, pp. 144-152 (1978).

Nice Memorial Day weather. I pulled up to a light, banging time to the music against the outside of my car door. A bit ahead of me in the other lane, I noticed a guy in a ragtop; I couldn't hear his sound system. I wondered: what do people in convertibles do when some jerk like me comes up, and they can't block out the sound? There was some space ahead of him -- he could have pulled further away from me. I had Little Feat's ``Dixie Chicken'' on -- I turned up the volume. The guy in the ragtop turned and smiled, and gave me a solidarity sign.

Then one night in the lobby
Of the Commodore Hotel,
I chanced to meet a bartender
Who said he knew her well.

And as he handed me a drink,
He began to hum a song,
And all the boys at the bar
Began to sing along...

In Italian (and in Spanish, for that matter), lento is the adjective meaning `slow.' If your Italian comprehension is worse than your speech, Italians may answer you in a normal conversational speed. You need to say something like ``più lento, per piaciere!''

RALPH disbanded in 1987 when Gleason died. Its last convention was in August 1986 at the old Felt Forum in NYC (now called The Theatre at Madison Square Garden).

Good resources are The RAM Guide and The Ultimate Memory Guide. Here's a nice general tutorial on computer systems that has substantial information on memory.

Some operating systems require a great deal of RAM.

He wrote,

Experience in working with sunlight indicated the techniques necessary for the observation of extremely weak phenomena, viz. the rigorous exclusion of stray light and the conditioning of the observer's vision by a prolonged stay in darkness.

The Cardona group is well known for it. They offer about a 500-word introduction.

Here's some more instructional material from Virginia Tech.

Hundreds of K of captioned gifs are available from the Wilson group at UCSD, at a science TV level of sophistication.

`Rambam' is too easy to confuse with Ramban (for R. ben Nachman, or Nachmanides).

Note that most animals that reproduce sexually (and which therefore have natural gender) do not have both grammatical genders in Spanish. For example, frog and toad are la rana y el sapo. For more about that, see the sapo entry.

BTW, the Latin original of this word was ramus, a second-declension male noun, so one would expect only ramo in Spanish. On the other hand, gender wobbled a bit. One example I can think of is baculum, a Latin word meaning a staff of some sort. It was second-declension neuter, of course, but for some reason, I can't imagine why, it began to be declined male (as the word baculus) in late Roman times, until that became (I think) the word's predominant gender in Medieval Latin. In English now, a baculus (plural baculi) is a staff that serves as a symbol of authority. The restored classical form baculum is modern biological terminology for the penis-bone (found in many mammal species). The plural of baculum (in English -- as usual one uses only the nominative forms) is bacula. There is a Latin noun whose singular nominative form is bacula; it means `small berry.'

Scott Bakula plays Captain Jonathan Archer in Enterprise, a 2001 TV prequel of the original Star Trek series. The character played by Bakula is James Tiberius Kirk's childhood hero. Always some Latin, or at least Romance, connection.

The West Greek alphabet, adopted by the Etruscans and inherited by the Romans, began with alpha, beta, gamma, just like the East Greek alphabet more familiar to us. (And about like all the Semitic alphabets -- aleph, bet, gimel in Hebrew, for example.) If you rotate a capital gamma counterclockwise by 45 degrees, it looks like an angular letter cee. (Back before printing, rotation was one of the most common deformations suffered by letter glyphs.) Over time, the sound of that third letter became devoiced in Latin, so instead of a hard gee sound as in the English word goat, it had a hard cee sound as in the English word coat. A way to represent the gee sound was still wanted, so a new letter based on cee was invented and inserted in the alphabet after the letter eff (which was the old Greek letter digamma). Notice the resemblance of the glyphs C and G? Most Latin words that contained the hard cee sound (i.e., the sound of kay or Greek kappa) were originally written K, but it eventually became common to write them with a C instead. With a few exceptions (like Kaeso), K came to be used in Latin primarily to transliterate the kappa in Greek loan words. I'm not sure if specific evidence exists that bacula was originally written bakula, but it is the natural presumption.

The indecision -- whether to use cee or kay to represent the hard-cee sound, recurred in other languages that adopted versions of the Latin alphabet. English and German, which replaced runes with Latin characters very roughly about the time they replaced indigenous paganism with Christianity, both went through an early period during which neither character was dominant. Eventually, cee became dominant in English (particularly in word-initial position and in consonant clusters, and wherever the consonant was not followed by e or i) , and kay became dominant in German. In both cases, the convergence on a preferred letter involved reform of some spellings that had become established. In English, for example, the adjective ending -ick was replaced by -ic, and etymologically unrelated final -ick was also often changed (when unstressed, I suppose). This might make a little clearer why we add a -k- in forming the past tense of -ic verbs (panic, panicked; picnic, picnicked, traffic, trafficked) instead of doubling the final consonant of the root in the usual way.

Incidentally, in Spanish one increasingly finds the word área used in the transferred sense of an abstract area of ideas or activities, just as in English. This is a recent development, an anglicismo. As recently as fifty years ago, área was rarely used except in reference to physical space.

If you look over the preceding entry as a whole, I think you will agree that most of the content was related to the headword. If you don't agree, too bad.

M-m-m-myyyy Ramona!

Oh wait, that was Sharona. A Ramones song? Never mind.

Anyway, a bass player and singer named Douglas Glenn Colvin learned something of this. (Precisely what Colvin had heard or knew is either already known or never will be, since he's dead.) With this as his inspiration, he adopted the stage name Dee Dee Ramone. Two guys he was starting up a band with in 1974 followed suit, and they named their group the Ramones. All subsequent band members, including Tom, who joined before their first public performance, adopted stage names with a Ramone surname. The first names and initials that were used with the surname were uniformly uninteresting and unoriginal. It's horrifying to think that the Spice Girls represented progress of any kind at all, but there you are.

At the University of Buffalo in 1994 or so, some students formed a group they called the Algonquin Round Table. My immediate reaction was that since they were unlikely to measure up to the original and famous group whose name they took, their choice of name was in the nature of lèse majesté. If Colvin et al. had called themselves ``The McCartneys,'' it would have been something like that. So I suppose they might be praised for their restraint, of all things.

Starting under USAAF funding, the Douglas Aircraft Company conducted a research program called Project RAND from 1945-8, a preliminary study of earth-orbiting satellites. In May 1948, RAND became an independent organization. It used to figure in loopy conspiracy theories. I order you not to believe them.

RAPID is a not-for-profit 501(c)(6) organization formed by over 70 leading agricultural companies to allow the agricultural community to take advantage of the new developments in electronic communications. This organization was formed by the American Crop Protection Association with the purpose of moving the agriculture industry manufacturers, distributors, resellers, growers and others to new levels of communications, electronic commerce and regulatory compliance and stewardship capabilities.

In the early 1990's, several agricultural companies formed the Ag [sic] Alliance for Electronic Communication (AAEC). This group began the effort to develop necessary standards and guidelines to make electronic commerce work for the entire industry. In July 1995, that organization evolved into a separate legal entity called RAPID ..., an industry consortium dedicated to bringing Electronic Commerce solutions to all of agribusiness.

For more about rock material vide infra. For more on the Rock'n'Roll-chemistry nexus, see the geology and Li entries.

Back in the 1980's, a research group found surprisingly high rare earth concentrations in meteorites that fell to earth in Antarctica -- where the chance of environmental contamination is minimal. Specifically, they discovered perfect microscopic spheres very high in rare earth content on the surface of the meteorite. This was a very puzzling discovery. Eventually, they got another publication (in Scripta Physica) out of their research -- a retraction, in which they described very similar microspheres of essentially the same composition, generated by the flint from their cigarette lighters.

I'll put in the reference when I find my file of this sort of thing. I wanted to at least mention it now because it gives me an entry in which to add the following: In Houston, Texas, on the ides of March, 2001, an eighteen-wheeler overturned and spilled its 23-ton load of frozen chickens, closing part of I-10 for several hours. The driver had lost control of the rig when he dropped his cigarette and bent over to pick it up.

The rock group called ``Rare Earth'' was originally called ``The Sunliners.'' They had some limited success and released records with MGM, Hercules, Golden World, and Verve. They signed with Motown in 1969, and the name-change was inspired or imposed by Motown execs. More at RE, but not about the rock group.

Rockets, jet engines, and squid all use a backward-directed jet of fluid to generate thrust. Squid suck in the fluid (dirty water, yuck) from sides and front and squirt it out the back. Jet engines suck air in the front and mix it with fuel in a turbine. The fuel-air mix burns, and the expansion (of the air and combustion gases, mostly H₂O and CO₂) turns the turbine. The turning of the turbine pulls in more air and propels a jet of exhaust backward. Part of the jet force comes from the fact that the exhaust gases are under higher pressure than the intake air. It would be simpler if you just burned the fuel and used its expansion directly, but then how would you get the expansion to produce a backward-directed jet without a forward-directed jet?

Rockets are simpler in that respect. Instead of sucking in air to oxidize the fuel, they use oxidant that is carried with the vehicle, condensed in tanks, the same way fuel is carried. From a practical perspective, oxidant and fuel (reducer) are similar: volatile, dangerously combustible condensed materials in tanks. Hence, the propellants are sometimes both loosely called ``fuel.''

Similarly, jet and rocket engines both propel by burning fuel to produce a backward-directed jet, and so are somewhat similar in practical terms. Hence also, the term JATO is often used where RATO confused. Here (see pg. 2) is a clear instance of ``RATO/JATO'' being used where only RATO is meant. If you want to be charitable, you can say that RATO is jet-assisted, just not jet engine-assisted.

The scientific method is like that.

A biologist conducted a series of experiments on a grasshopper. When he shouted ``jump'' or clapped, he could make it jump (``induce saltatory behavior,'' as he wrote in journals). So he removed its front (prothoracic) legs and yelled, and the grasshopper still jumped. He removed the middle two legs (mesothoracic), and the grasshopper still jumped. Finally, he removed the rear legs (metathoracic), and the grasshopper did not jump. He concluded that a grasshopper hears with its hind legs. Fascinating similar research is described at a BBL entry.

When my old boss at Naval Research Labs (NRL) told this story over beers at the end of my first week at work, I pointed out that many insects do hear with their legs. [I think it's called keeping an ear to the ground, but I didn't say so.] Years later, he told me that this had been the first sign to him that I might be alright after all.

I say that the blueness we see in the atmosphere is not intrinsic color, but is caused by warm vapor evaporated in minute and insensible atoms on which the solar rays fall, rendering them luminous against the infinite darkness of the fiery sphere which lies beyond and includes it.... If you produce a small quantity of smoke and if you place [behind it] a piece of black velvet on which the sun does not fall, you will see that the black stuff will appear of a beautiful blue color.... Water violently ejected in a fine spray and in a dark chamber where the sunbeams are admitted produces then blue rays.... Hence it follows, as I say, that the atmosphere assumes this azure hue by reason of the particles of moisture which catch the rays of the sun.

According to one book:

It is impossible to translate the Russian word razvedka precisely into any foreign language. It is usually rendered as `reconnaissance' or `spying' or `intelligence gathering'. A fuller explanation of the word is that it describes any means and any actions aimed at obtaining information about an enemy, analysing it and understanding it properly, like cleaning your eyeglasses.

(Emphasis added. Actually, the whole emphasized phrase was added.) Perhaps the claim about ``any'' foreign language is overstrong. I don't imagine the author checked more than a few hundred languages before giving up, do you? Anyway, assuming that the standard for precise translation is not set so high that most words are untranslatable, I think `intelligence operations' or `secret-agent stuff' may do. This quote opens the second chapter, ``Spetsnaz and the GRU,'' of a book by ``Viktor Suvorov'' (actually Vladimir Rezun; see spetsnaz entry for details).

Spetsnaz, not to put another fine point on it, is `special ops.' Rezun goes on to say: ``Spetsnaz is one of the forms of Soviet military razvedka which occupies a place somewhere between reconnaissance and intelligence.'' It doesn't look that way to me... ``Spetsnaz differs from other forms of razvedka in that it not only seeks and finds important enemy targets, but in the majority of cases attacks and destroys them.'' I guess you could think of this as a form of constructive proof in intelligence analysis: if you destroy an enemy asset, say, then you have given a proof that it no longer exists. Okay, then: a ``destructive non-existence proof,'' if you insist. But it's really just a kind of muscular logic.

I suppose Rezun might have had a point in insisting. Among the best-known KGB spetsnaz operations was the coup against Afghan president Hafizullah Amin, two days after Christmas in 1979. This doesn't really fit entirely under the category of intelligence gathering. Then again, in 1954 a coup was orchestrated in Guatemala by the US CIA, so a somewhat similar operation (in general outcome if not in method) was conducted by an ``intelligence'' organization. But by this reasoning, the secret service protection of the US President is a treasury operation. Well, maybe it is. Still, we wouldn't say training, aiding, and advising a Guatemalan rebel army is an ``intelligence operation,'' but rather a ``covert operation.'' Eh.

Incidentally, I earlier referred the date of the Afghan coup to a US, yes US, holiday. I did this specifically because there is a natural and general pattern of taking action when one's enemies are at a lower level of readiness due to their holidays, and in this case the relevant strong enemy was the US. (If it had been Canada, I'd have written ``hours after Boxing Day,'' which sounds more aggressive.) Other examples: The 1973 Arab war against Israel, launched on Yom Kippur, the holiest Jewish holiday, and George Washington's famous crossing of the Delaware to attack Hessian troops on Christmas night in 1776. In the latter case, there is a legend that aftereffects of drunken Christmas revelry in the Hessian camp contributed to the American victory, but apparently the main advantage in the attack timing was simply that of surprise, and weather that on balance worked to American advantage.

Incidentally, while we're on the subject of kudzu (Radix puerariae). A chemical called daidzin can be extracted from it that reduces the preference of hamsters to drink alcohol rather than water, but these results (like earlier similar results with Prozac) are suspect because hamsters metabolize alcohol too quickly to achieve intoxication -- they apparently drink for the calories, and will give up alcohol for chocolate drink with similar calorie content (first preference) or tomato juice with similar content (second choice). The research was reported in 1995.

Look at it this way: FM broadcast-band frequencies are located 200 kHz apart. There's no point broadcasting sound with pitches much above 20 kHz, unless you're broadcasting for dogs, so even with stereo broadcasts they're not using 160kHz of the bandwidth allocated. There's plenty of unused bandwidth for a little bit of digital data. (No, the pun was unintentional, completely unavoidable; I do not apologize.) In fact, systems have been in place for years which piggy-back signals for private subscribers multiplexed over the public signal. Sometimes, this is where Muzak comes from -- i.e., the way franchises get their music ``piped in'' without extra wiring. (Actually, the available bandwidth is greater in principle and narrower by law: two radio stations in close geographic proximity are not allocated adjacent frequencies, but in any case the FCC limits the transmission bandwidth.)

It occurs to me that window blinds, which used to be called Venetian blinds in the English, are called persianas in Spanish. Hmm. I may not have been the only one dissatisfied with the old name. ``Royal Blind Society has merged and is part of RBS.RVIB.VAF Ltd incorporating the former businesses of Royal Blind Society of NSW (RBS), Royal Victorian Institute for the Blind (RVIB) and the Vision Australia Foundation (VAF).'' A company called ``Brand by Voice'' was hired ``to position and brand the newly combined agency. Brand by Voice has extensive experience in brand development and strategy for major organizations in both the public and private sectors. ... They have worked for Qantas, Vodafone, AMP, NAB, St George, PricewaterhouseCoopers, The National Breast Cancer Foundation and the Australian Government.'' I imagine that they also invented those funny words (wallaby, etc.) and the practice of making ay and aye sound alike. (Marketing issues are discussed at the Polish entry.)

``Brand by Voice is currently [2004] in its discovery phase consulting with key stakeholders, gaining insights into specific audiences, competitors and potential challenges.'' Yeah, well, don't make it sound like an interior decorator group, or an exhibitor's booth at a duck-hunters' convention. Isn't this a charity? What are ``competitors''?

See ``A New Mechanism for Degradation of Al-Si-Cu/TiN/Ti Contacted p-n Junction,'' by Takehito Yoshida, Hiroyuki Kawahara and Shin-ichi Ogawa in Procs. of the 1992 IRPS, pp. 344-348.

Roman Catholic students at secular colleges are served by Newman Centers. There is a Newman Center at UB.

The name ``Roman Catholic Church'' (i.e., the names corresponding to it in various languages) was introduced by Pope Eugenius IV in 1445.

The word ``catholic'' is essentially synonymous with ``universal.''

RCA shares most of its courses with Scholars' Online Academy (SOLA) a parallel school of ISLAS that is broadly Christian. The RCA curriculum includes some additional explicitly Catholic curricular items like elementary theology and a course in Scholastic philosophy.

The fact of being a royal dominion did not automatically confer on Canada's navy the status of ``royal'' or the right to use the term in its name. The Canadian government formally requested the honor in January 1911, and was notified on August 29 of his majesty's approval and authorization to designate the Canadian Naval Forces by ``Royal Canadian Navy.'' For details see Roger Sarty: The Maritime Defence of Canada (Toronto: Canadian Institute of Strategic Studies, 1996).

The service continued under the RCN designation until it was integrated into the Canadian Armed Forces, which formally came into being on February 1, 1968. The destruction of the RCN was the handiwork of Liberal Paul Hellyer, Defense Minister from 1964 to 1967. See Marc Milner: Canada's Navy: The First Century (Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 1999).

RCP keeps track of polls on major political races (i.e., those that attract repeated polling) and computes a running average of recent ones. These ``RCP averages'' is widely cited in political commentary. RCP averages give equal weight to all polls included, regardless of size. (Theoretically, one should weight such multiple estimates by the inverse of the variance. If it can be assumed, as it often is assumed, that the different polls attempt to measure the same number, then this means that each poll should be weighted by its sample size. In other words, one should estimate support for a candidate by counting the total number of supporters over all the polls.) The crude averaging done by RCP is not too terrible since the underlying polls are clearly so flawed that the sample sizes are probably not the dominant source of error. RCP averages also make no distinction among polls of likely voters, polls of registered voters, and more inclusive polls.

RCP was founded in 2000. Since at least 2007, it has had two sister sites, also essentially news-and-commentary aggregators: RealClearSports (RCS) and RealClearMarkets (RCM).

Drinking at a bar (Elmo's) last year [``last year'' when I wrote this around 1996], I met a physics BA who teaches science in a Southtowns school. He told me that one of the courses he was teaching was ``Regents Science.'' I replied that it must be fun to teach an advanced science course to good students. I was sadly mistaken. Regents science is a course for students who don't care about science at all, and are taking a course strictly to meet a distasteful requirement.

If you insert a couple of vowels, just to make RCTM pronounceable, what word suggests itself as model?

Of course, some people will think of RTFM.

``...a strategic partnership set up to champion science, engineering and technology supported by the seven UK Research Councils. Through RCUK, the Research Councils are working together to create a common framework for research, training and knowledge transfer. In doing this RCUK will work alongside OST to further support for the UK's best academic researchers and deliver the best investment for society.''

``OST''? I guess that must be some other Office of Science and Technology.

See also FCUK.

Cf. SD.

You know, the adoption of so many loan words and even abbreviations from English into foreign languages is of significance to English speakers, because it makes foreign languages easy to understand. Here, for example, is some text from unsolicited email that I received:

Kami, Prihatin Services daripada unit R&D, Latihan dan Perhubungan Awam PEKIDA MALAYSIA ingin menawarkan pekej ini untuk dimanfaatkan oleh ahli keluarga, syarikat dan organisasi Saudara/Saudari.

Sure, you miss some of the grammatical subtleties, but basically, I got all the information out of this that I really wanted to get.

The Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a specification currently under development within the W3C Metadata activity. RDF is designed to provide an infrastructure to support metadata across many web-based activities. RDF is the result of a number of metadata communities bringing together their needs to provide a robust and flexible architecture for supporting metadata on the Internet and WWW. Example applications include sitemaps, content ratings, stream channel definitions, search engine data collection (web crawling), digital library collections, and distributed authoring.

RDF will allow different application communities to define the metadata property set that best serves the needs of each community. RDF will provide a uniform and interoperable means to exchange the metadata between programs and across the Web. Furthermore, RDF will provide a means for publishing both a human-readable and a machine-understandable definition of the property set itself.

RDF will use XML as the transfer syntax in order to leverage other tools and code bases being built around XML.

For further details, see the C&EN of August 25, 1986, p. 44.

More at rare earth entry.

Learn more at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.

Flesch Reading Ease

     =   206.835 
       - 1.015 x <words per sentence>
       - 84.6 x <syllables per word>

Scores above ninety correspond to a fourth-grade reading level. Whoa -- 61.325! A score that is above a score of nine times a ten corresponds to a fourth-grade level of reading. Uh, 81.055. Wait till next year, kid. (Fifth grade: 80-90.) There's a lot of interesting information encoded in this formula. I guess what the FRE tells you is that the easiest-to-read sentences containing x excess syllables are those in which those extra syllables are diluted among a total of sqrt(cx) words (c = 83.34975). I never would have guessed that. Linear functions of things that monkeys can compute on a four-banger are fascinating things. (That scored a 50.557. ``Fairly difficult'' is at the ``some high school'' grade level: 50-60.) Lincoln's Gettysburg Address scores 64. (I mean the address itself scores 64, not the words ``Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.'' And now we know why he didn't begin with the much-harder-to-understand ``Eighty-seven years ago....'' ``Standard'' difficulty, 7th-8th grade: 60-70. College level ``and up'' is 0-30.)

Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level

     = -15.59
       + 0.39 x <words per sentence>
       + 11.8 x <syllables per word>

Gunning's Fog Index

     = 0.4 x ( <words per sentence> + <long words per sentence> )

In his ``At the Movies'' column in the February 12, 1999, New York Times, Bernard Weinraub reported:

Several Hollywood marketing executives and producers were almost united in explaining why the academy snubbed ``The Truman Show.'' They said that while some newspapers and magazine critics lavishly praised the movie, people in Hollywood didn't quite get what all the hoopla was about.

``It was a critics' phenomenon, and the town never liked the movie,'' one top producer said.

A studio marketing executive said that an oft-heard comment about the movie was that it had been overpraised, and that there might have been a glimmer of resentment among actors over Mr. Carrey's relatively effortless leap from comedy to drama. The actors [sic] branch of the Academy selects the acting nominees.

In addition, Mr. Carrey's chances of an Oscar nomination may have been hurt by his winning a best-actor prize at the Golden Globes, awarded by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association...

``It may have been, `O.K., he got the Golden Globe, that's enough,' '' the marketing executive said.

That third-edition preface concludes with the following: ``[T]he etymologies suggested are usually my own, and from the nature of the surnames included tend to be either obvious or highly speculative, but experience has shown that as many enquiries are received concerning the former type as of surname as for the more difficult ones.''

For surname etymologies I usually go first to Hanks and Hodges and the book by the Kohlheims listed at the Familienname entry. If I cite only Reaney and Wilson, then it probably means that these failed me.

This is probably a good place to explain about personals-ad pictures. Often it will seem that the age of the person in the picture is not consistent with the age in the profile. Here are some rules that I have developed on the basis of the scientific experimental method, that will enable you to interpret the significance of this inconsistency.

1. IF the person in the picture looks much older than the age given in the profile, then the picture gives a more accurate indication of the person's age.
2. IF, on the other hand, the picture looks much younger than the age given in the profile, then the profile gives an age that is closer to being correct.

You probably find this bewildering, but the explanation is simple: people have a natural desire to be honest. However, it often happens that for technical reasons, the profile lists an age that differs in a quantitative way from the current chronological age of the person described. Since this is a mathematical issue, the reasons go beyond what we can explain here. However, because a so-called ``fictitious age'' is given, the person placing the ad may wish to also give an indication of so-called ``actual age.'' For this purpose, a recent photograph may be used.

On the other hand, sometimes the age listed in the ad coincides with the age of the person who places the ad. This is so unexpected that it can cause confusion, leading the reader to underestimate the age of the person advertising. In order to get around this problem, the advertiser uses a method designed to exaggerate age. The method has two steps: (1) select an OLD picture, and (2) AGE the picture. For example, suppose the advertising person is 55, but the age listed in the profile is also 55. Because this is so confusing, the reader is likely to think that the advertiser is only 40 -- a fifteen-year error! The solution is to illustrate the ad with a picture that not only is fifteen years old (taken when the advertiser was 40), but also to age this picture, not using it when it is deceptively young but instead using it now, only after it has matured fifteen years -- an old picture of an older person. This is the method of over-correction: a fifteen-year-old picture is used fifteen years after it was taken, for a total correction of thirty years.

The tangled webs people weave to be honest -- it's amazing.

Seen in a Toronto ad: ``I'm a 40-something Canadian (30 US).'' [Man, she must have aged something awful in 2007.]

Sometimes, an appropriate old photograph is not available. In these situations, the prospective dater trying to be honest is forced to use the photograph of someone else. An example can be found at the entry for I value honesty. Something similar happened with the photograph of Jennifer Kesse of Orlando, Florida, who disappeared under mysterious circumstances in late January 2006. Photographs of her appear on a missing-person website maintained by her parents. In mid-2007, one of these photos was found illustrating a personals ad for a person who described herself (or himself, who knows?) as a 25-year-old looking for ``a special older man to love, to be very good friends with.'' This ``wonderful older man'' she seeks will want to be with a young woman and ``will love me for who I am,'' as she puts it. A photograph of Kesse was also used by someone on a lesbian dating site. Detective Joel Wright of the Orlando Police Department says, ``More than likely, it's somebody just trying to make themselves look better for someone they might want to meet later on. I wonder what happens when they do meet that person.'' One guess is that the wonderful older man might be wonderfully near-blind, but then the advantage of posting a pretty picture would be limited.

I think what generally happens when someone catches a date on false pretenses is that the other person tries to be polite and cuts the date as short as possible, and that's their last date. For the person who repeatedly gets dates this way, it has to be a strange social life. Back before online dating sites, my uncle Robert advised that the ideal first date is for coffee, so you can bail out quickly. (He's a pilot.)

I'm quite proud of the fact that I managed to write this entire entry without once mentioning The Picture of Dorian Gray, but I couldn't resist the urge to crow about it.

Incidentally, as you will have noticed, German compound terms (particularly nouns) are typically written as single words. This makes it important to be able to recognize the component words. That's usually pretty easy, even for non-native speakers (see VLIW entry for examples), but there are special cases that can trip one up. Words beginning with recht are one such case: they may be compounds of

1. the adjective recht (`right,' in many of the English positional or geometric senses, and then some) like Rechteck (`rectangle');
2. the directional adverb rechts (`to or on the right') like Rechtsabbieger (`a driver or vehicle that is turning right') or rechtshändig (`right-handed');
3. the noun Recht (`law, justice') like rechtmäßig (`legal') or rechtfertigen (`to justify');
4. the genitive form Rechts (`of the law') like Rechtsanwalt (translated as `lawyer' or `attorney');
5. the adjective recht (`correct, honest') like rechtzeitig (`punctual') or Rechtschreibung.

Well, I ended up saying a little more than I had originally intended. That happens sometimes, and it can obscure the main point. Obviously, the various senses of recht, etc., are related and shade into one another, just as do the various senses of right and rights in English. The point, though, is that the ess following recht may be an inflection or may be the first letter of the next word in the compound. In principle, there might be a pair of distinct words like rechtsoof and rechtsoof, constructed with soof and oof respectively, but I can't come up with an example.

Until we have an entry for right, I'll add here that in Spanish, derecho has a melange of legal senses similar to recht in German. For example, it means `law' in general, as a branch of study or a system of concepts (a particular law is a ley), and also `right, prerogative.' By extension, it has the sense (usually in plural) of `duty,' or what one pays to exercise a legal privilege (e.g., derechos aduaneros). (I guess it's a bonus that `correct' in the most general sense is not one of its standard meanings.) What might be slightly confusing is that derecho is an adverb meaning `straight ahead' while derecha is a noun meaning `right' (i.e., a la derecha means `on [or to] the right'). [Okay, strictly speaking, many dictionaries still consider this to be not an instance of a noun derecha, but the noun phrase mano derecha (`right hand') with mano elided, but usage says different.]

The AC-to-DC power supply almost has a rectenna. It has a transformer with a primary winding that takes line current. This induces an alternating magnetic flux in the transformer core, which in turn (pardon the pun) induces an AC voltage in the secondary winding. The voltage across the secondary is put across a full-wave rectifier bridge (four diodes in obvious orientations) to produce a noisy DC signal. A capacitor shunt across the DC output functions as a primitive low-pass filter and gives a reasonably flat DC final output. That's the way it used to be, of course. Nowadays, there's fancy intelligent circuitry everywhere. Also nowadays, the final output can feed a lightweight supercapacitor, providing excellent surge protection.

The reason the secondary of a power transformer is not regarded as an element of a rectenna is that the mechanism of power transmission is mutual inductance. However, at high frequency, the mutual inductance has a pole (the pole is complex -- ordinary resistance in the circuit gives the pole frequency a nonzero but small imaginary part). In this region, the mathematical description of the power transmission between primary and secondary is equivalent to that of a transmitting and receiving antenna. Physically, the secondary is so close that one is not in the radiation regime, but from a circuit-designer's POV, that (i.e., the form of the signal variation in the vicinity of the receiving antenna) is not very relevant.

It's not clear whether it is correct in English to use this terminology for books written in a right-to-left language. I found an interesting unintended solution of this problem at the Zimmerman library at UNM. They had a volume of Talmud (all Hebrew and Aramaic) bound upside down.

In Germany in 2005, a new leftist party called the Linkspartei (`party of the left') won a small chunk of seats in parliamentary elections that yielded a muddled result. Neither of the two leading parties had enough seats to form a majority government without at least two of the three small parties, and one of the possible coalitions considered was among the SDP (main socialist party) with the Linkspartei and the Greens. This possibility was called red-red-green (rot-rot-grün). (Rot-grün-rot was less common, by a factor of ten or more. You'd think that might be because the Linkspartei won a few more seats than the Greens (54 to 51), but in fact the red-red-green order was widely used in political speculation long before the election, at times when the relative showings of the small parties -- and even whether the new party would win seats -- were uncertain. I guess it says something subtle about the German sense of proper color-word order.) In any case, the Linkspartei -- composed of the old PDS and former SPD socialists led by Oskar Lafontaine.

In the US, the color association of red with communism gave rise to the pejorative term pinko.

There's a book cleverly titled Red Blues: Voices from the Last Wave of Russian Immigrants, by Dennis Shasha and Marina Shron (New York: Holmes and Meier Publ., Inc., 2002). Mark Kopelev's story alone would make a good one-hour sit-com pilot.

It ought to be possible to do something funny with red-C and Red Sea, but I'll leave that as an exercise for the diligent reader.

Hardened red brass with an 80/20 (Cu/Zn) composition has a density of 8.6 g/cc, a bulk modulus (E) of 100 GPa, shear modulus (G) of 39 GPa, and a Poisson's ratio v (nu) of 0.34.

If you reach a wrong number, then hang up and press REDIAL, you reach the same wrong number. Every time. It's been investigated both theoretically and experimentally, so you may as well resign yourself to it.

When an atom is oxidized, its oxidation number increases. (Big surprise there, huh?) Oxidation number is essentially a measure of ionic charge, and since charge is conserved, every oxidation-number increase is accompanie