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.

The general information in the preceding paragraph came mostly from conversations with three other rabbit owners. Now I want to share a couple of things I learned during my own one-month stint as a rabbit owner:

1. A rabbit that has been potty-trained may experience confusion in a new environment. In particular, it may seem to know that it should do its business in a rectangular tray, but may not realize that the presence of newspaper and straw are crucial identifying marks of the appropriate receptacle. It may therefore use any overturned boxtop it finds in a secluded location.
2. The domestic rabbit has an innate habbit (that must be the spelling) of gnawing on electrical wiring. In my experience, if the wire is a plugged-in power cord, it gnaws through the insulation and stops after some of the wire is exposed. I haven't observed the process -- only its effects -- but from the condition of the wires it seems that a number of shocks are required before the rabbit gives up. I suppose high humidity would be helpful -- the rabbit would thus be well-grounded and well-shocked.

Hares are not rabbits. Hares were already in Europe during Roman times when rabbits from Spain invaded and colonized Europe. The origin of the name of Spain is uncertain, but one popular hypothesis traces it to the Punic (i.e. Carthaginian- and Phoenician-language) word for rabbit, tsepan or span in a couple of Latin-character renderings.

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...

The Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland created in 1871 resulted from the remerger of the Anthropological Society with the Ethnological Society, from which the former had split off in 1863 as a result of ``racialist issues'' not further described at the society's short history page. The secession was led by James Hunt and Captain Richard Burton and was created ``ostensibly to provide an alternative to the Ethnological Society after the latter had allowed the admission of the `fair sex' to meetings'' according to an ``[e]xtract from W. Chapman's unpublished D.Phil thesis 1981, `Ethnology in the Museum'.'' (I'm not sure whose view is expressed in the quoted text.) Quoting from the same webpage: ``Following Hunt's death, the Anthropological Society itself, ... had generally lapsed into disarray.''

At the IC entry, you can read about the Illinois Central accident in 1900 that took the life of the man remembered as ``Casey'' Jones. At the KX entry you can read about a couple of accidents that took place at the King's Cross station north of London, in 1946 and 2002. The TOPS entry mentions the crash that took place at Southall (west London) in 1997. The next fatal accident on British railways took place two years later, October 5, 1999. That accident is described right here, at the entry you're reading.

Thirty-one people were killed at Ladbroke Grove, west London -- a Thames train went through a red signal (spadded) and collided head-on with a high-speed service traveling from Cheltenham to Paddington. These two accidents (Southall and Ladbroke Grove) occurred about 8 miles apart, on the same line, and in circumstances that at least superficially appear to bear a strong resemblance. Subsequent fatal accidents (October 17, 2000, four dead and 87 injured when the London-to-Leeds express derailed on a broken track near Hatfield station in Hertfordshire, and the 2002 accident described at the KX entry) seem to have been more track-related.

(There was also an accident at Selby on February 28, 2001, when a Land Rover veered off the M62 in North Yorkshire into the path of a GNER train coming from Newcastle. Driver Gary Hart, who had fallen asleep at the wheel, survived but was sentenced to five years in prison for causing death by dangerous driving.)

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).

Most RAM is organized in rectangular arrays of word lines and bit lines. Any code in the process of execution, and as much as possible of the data which that code requires, are stored in RAM. (For a complication, see the OVL entry.)

Until the late 1960's, the RAM in most computers was in the form of arrays of small ferrite ``cores.'' (That's the origin of the term ``core dump.'') A bit was encoded by the direction of magnetization of a core. The first great success of MOS technology was the rapid take-over of the core memory market by SRAM. SRAM and especially DRAM are still the overwhelmingly dominant forms of central RAM.

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).

Ramekins were traditionally made with the same material and finish as teacups and other flatware (i.e., either porcelain, or a substitute for porcelain such as hard low-friction plastic). Metal (stainless steel) is also common. If they were made of paper, they'd be cupcaKe cups.

Restaurants use ramekins to supply patrons with Individual servings of salad dressing ``on the side,'' dips, sauces, etc. Ramekin is easier to say than ``non-Newtonian-fluid container.''

Hmm. It turns out that ramekin is not an acronym. Not even an akrenim. I guess you can ignore the expansion capitalizations in the preceding paragraphs. If you did not ignore them before, you can go back and ignore them later. Anyway, the word ramekin, also spelled ramequin, is from the French ramequin, which was a food item. Exactly which food items were covered by the term is not entirely clear to me, but something like a miniature soufflé may have been one of them. In English, the name eventually became attached to the dish used to make the, uh, dish -- metonymy is a two-way street.

Some deathly-boring stories about ramekin-related conversations can be found at the restaurant jargon entry, so go there right away. (But don't forget to go back first and ignore that odd capitalization.)

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 also a Latin noun whose singular nominative form is bacula; it means `small berry.'

Scott Bakula played Captain Jonathan Archer in Enterprise, a 2001 TV prequel of the original Star Trek series. The character played by Bakula was (i.e., will have been) 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.

In principle, the inspector general of an agency is independent of the agency head, and there are rules meant to allow the inspector general to act without fear of interference by political appointees or the White House. It's a civil-servicey sort of idea. The RAT Board now will have the authority to ask ``that an inspector general conduct or refrain from conducting [sic] an audit or investigation.'' If the inspector general doesn't want to do so, then the IG must write a report explaining his decision to the board, to the agency head and to Congress. Fans of the institution of the inspector general, and of inspectors' general independence (I hope that's the pl. poss. form) fear that this oversight will have a chilling effect on IG's. I don't know who gets to sit on a RAT Board.

It's not known who put the RAT language in the bill, since the bill was ``crafted'' behind closed doors in a hurry. (It's doubtful that any single person -- legislator or staffer -- could have read all 1073 pages of the bill, let alone studied or largely understood it.) Byron York, chief political correspondent for the DC Examiner, reported that he was told by one Democratic senator that the RAT Board was ``something the Obama administration wanted included in this bill.'' (If true this would be one of the few indications that the Obama administration made an effort to influence the legislation.) When York asked the White House, staffers told him they'd ``look into it.'' He didn't hear back.

Iowa Republican Sen. Charles Grassley, a longtime champion of inspectors general, only heard about the RAT Board from a concerned IG, a couple of days before the conference committee reported out a final bill. He was alarmed by the words ``conduct or refrain from conducting.'' On Friday, Feb. 13, as the bill was barreling toward narrow passage, Grassley wanted to voice his objections on the floor of the ``world's greatest deliberative body,'' as the US Senate is fatuously known. But there was no time in the rush to a vote, so Grassley's statement went unread. Part of his prepared statement: ``It's fitting that the acronym for this board is RAT, because that's what I smell here.''

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.

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.)

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.

They only play cricket there, so it's not a problem.

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).

RCP has appeared since 2008 ``three times a year (April-May, July-August, November-December) and publishes articles in all areas of political science. It was founded in 1979.'' The website is available in Spanish, English, and (partly) in Portuguese. Articles are accepted in Spanish or English. Titles and formal abstracts are given in both Spanish and English. According to the instructions for contributors of articles, authors are required to submit abstracts (up to 120 words) in both languages. The front cover of each issue lists the titles of contributions only in the language each item is written in; the online-edition tables of contents give article titles in the language in which the webpage is being read. I marvel at all the free time I must have had when I first drafted this entry.

Judging from the one copy I had in hand (vol. 29, no. 1, 2009), the contributions fall into four categories: artículo, estudio, dossier, and recensión. The Dossier seems to be a collection of related articles on a broad theme, presumably invited. Recensiónes here are book reviews. I can't tell what distinguishes the articles from the studies.

The one from Puerto Rico is published by the Centro de Investigaciones Sociales - Universidad de Puerto Rico - Recinto de Río Piedras. (Investigaciones sociales is an ordinary way to say `social [science] research'; Río Piedras is a district of San Juan.) It was first published as a quarterly beginning in March 1957 (one volumen and four números per year).

Now the words Nueva Época (a slightly old-fashioned way of saying nueva serie, -- `new series') appear before the issue information. I've got ``Nueva Época Número 6 - Enero de 1999'' before me, and as of June 2012 the current issue is number 22. The pricing information says there are currently two numbers per year. I can square this if they published annually through 2008 (no. 15) and no. 23 is due later this year, and if I were creating word problems for Algebra I, this would definitely be interesting to me.

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 their explanation of 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.

In Spanish, the idea expressed by recherché in English is expressed by the native construction rebuscado (based on buscar, `to look for, to go get'). It is typical that English would rely on a loan. But given the cultural associations of France and French, the use of an unnaturalized loan (as signaled by the retained acute accent) is particularly appropriate to the apparently obsolete senses, making recherché in English connotatively homological.

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, umm, let me a little think, as Einstein would say in English.

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 (ν) 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 confirmed 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 accompanied by a compensating reduction. The simplest redox reactions can be separated into (written as the sum of) two half-reactions. The oxidation half-reaction (the reaction containing the species oxidized) is balanced with electrons on the product side, and the reduction half-reaction is balanced with an equal number of electrons on the reactant side. Batteries work by arranging for the half-reactions to occur in separate locations, with the electrons moving from one half-reaction location to the other via the electrodes and through an external circuit.

Mnemonic: ``R.''

It took me a long time to develop this compact mnemonic, and while I was doing all that work, one of the approaches I explored was motivational: why was red chosen to be associated with Republicans? I think it went like this: red, white and blue, the colors of the US, UK, and French flags, are the standard colors for US political news (because they are so patriotically and distinctively American). Now white, or blanc, is the obvious choice for regions that are in one sense or another undecided. That leaves red and blue. The choice at that point is dictated by the association of red with communism, socialism, and the left generally. Socialist, you know, is a four-letter word in the US (or it would be, in a more efficient spelling). To suggest that the Democratic party is leftist would be a terrible slur, because it is left-leaning. On the other hand, most people wouldn't think for a moment of the G.O.P. as leftist. The implausibility of the leftist implication allows red to be assigned to the Republicans without danger of giving offense.

That's my story, and I'm sticking to it. But it does seems that this cause, whether ultimately decisive or not, was not strong enough to decide the now-standard color scheme before 2000. In an article for the February 8, 2004, New York Times Magazine, Tom Zeller reviews some of the pre-2000 chromatic diversity in EC maps, and offers various theories about what influenced the choice before it became an established convention. The article is archived by David Leip at his Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections website.

1. Mary Jane (pot).
2. Refrigerated truck trailer.

FDR's Democratic successor Harry Truman had low approval ratings at the end of his presidency, as did Lyndon Johnson (LBJ) and Jimmy Carter at the end of theirs, so it may be granted that presidents retired after fewer than eight years in office (as also Richard M. Nixon) lacked popularity endurance or something. However, the verb reelect defines only one measure of endurance. If one considers ``returned to office'' instead of ``reelected,'' one has a very different picture: Truman and LBJ were both returned to office after completing the term of the previous President. Truman served almost two full terms, so that FDR and he together gave Democrats a combined 20 years' control of the presidency. LBJ not only succeeded the assassinated John F. Kennedy (JFK) but succeeded in pushing much of Kennedy's program through Congress. Despite the mutual antagonism of the two men, their combined administrations from 1960 to 1968 represented a continuity of vision and policy, at least to the degree that events allowed. So if observation about infrequent reelection is intended to suggest that Democrats did not manage to put together extended periods of Presidential control, the suggestion is certainly wrong.

(That's all I started out to say, but I just couldn't stop myself, could I?)

The argument usually has a point, of course. One is supposed to extrapolate, from the implied historical failure of Democrats to stay in power, to their future difficulty in attaining it. Irrespective of the accuracy of the supposed conclusion, the argument is poor. The Democratic and Republican parties have been drifting in opposite directions, and their electability patterns before the 1970's are almost irrelevant to the patterns since Clinton.

In 1952, when Republican candidate Dwight Eisenhower was elected to succeed Truman, he could as well have been a Democrat; leaders of the Democratic party had approached him about the possibility. When Nixon was defeated by Kennedy in 1960, and when he served as president after 1968, his policies and his viewpoint were not very different from those of JFK. However, Nixon and Kennedy represented the centrist mainstreams of their parties, and both parties have since moved away from each other and the center.

The name of one reeve targeted by the Irish independence movement was given to the tactic used to protest his beggaring management: Boycott.

It would make the perfect motto for the legendary New York Public Library (NYPL). We're gonna make it our permanent motto for now.

Wah Chang describes itself as ``Producers and Fabricators of Refractory and Reactive Metals and Chemicals.''

1. Register, Registered, Registration.
2. Regular.
3. Regulation.

Sometimes you wonder about people's attitude. On Van Nuys Boulevard a bunch of years ago, at the southern edge of the valley, I was walkin' mellow and a big girl tried to buy a dime off me ($10 of coke). Like, sorry. There are many places where loitering is like wearing an ``open for business'' sign. My hair was long then. (Okay, okay: I still had hair then.) We got to talkin', while she was tokin' on her suspicious-lookin' cigarette. She had a boyfriend in rehab in Florida; she'd been in and out of rehab a few times herself. Life sucks. Just have a little mood adjustment now, the wagon'll be around again tomorrow, sure.

Regifting is a sign that the gift was not valued (in se) by the original recipient. (No guarantees about subsequent recipients either.) Too bad it didn't come with the sales receipt. Sometimes the only reason a present is not regifted is that it has reached a recipient with sense enough to realize no one wants it.

Some years back -- in a scholarly analysis of Christmas behavior, I think it was -- Dave Barry suggested that after being hammered together and, um, gifted for the first time, fruit cakes are passed down like heirlooms at subsequent Christmases.

Guicciardini's ricordo C107 reads, in Domandi's translation,

Best of all is not to be born a subject [i.e. born in a state that is itself vassal to another state]. But if it must be, then it is better to be the subject of a prince than of a republic. For a republic represses all of its subjects and gives only its own citizens a share of power. A prince acts more equitably towards all; the one is as much his subject as the other. Thus everyone may hope to receive benefits and employment from him.

In the Battle of the Ancients and Moderns (not formally begun yet), Guicciardini was all on the side of the Moderns. He liked to mention that he'd forgotten all the Greek he ever learned, and he chastised his friend Machiavelli for trying to apply the lessons of antiquity to the present day (their, say nothing of our present day). For example, C110:

How wrong it is to cite the Romans at every turn. For any comparison to be valid, it would be necessary to have a city with conditions like theirs, and then to govern it according to their example. In the case of a city with different qualities, the comparison is as much out of order as it would be to expect a jackass to race like a horse.

Nevertheless, C107 seems an interesting observation on the transition of Rome from a republic to a dictatorship. Guicciardini does use the experiences of individual Romans, as at C18 (Tacitus) and C31 (Fabian), although he more often cites persons of around his own time (the best known today of those he named would be Savonarola). He examples the experience of Cassius and Brutus at C121 to show how one shouldn't count on public support (they were forced to flee to the Capitol after accomplishing a murder they thought would be welcomed by the masses).

As a verb, reina means `reigns' (3rd pers. sing. pres. ind. of reinar, `to reign').

One dictionary I've checked (Diccionario Salamanca de la lengua española) endorses the use of reino as a synonym of the noun reinado, but this usage seems to be rare. Most dictionaries don't endorse it. (The precise numbers are not very significant, because most general Spanish dictionaries offer definitions that appear to be close paraphrases of those in the dictionary issued by the Real Academia. Timidity.)

An example of reino used in the sense of `kingdom' is reino unido, `united kingdom.' See RU for a bit on that. Untied kingdom is (or might be) written reino desatado in Spanish. Make of this what you will. Reino can be used in a more abstracted sense as a range. El reino de las matemáticas is what we call a little more prosaically `the field of mathematics.' The animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms are called reinos. Likewise now animales, vegetales, hongos, móneras y protistas.

More reinos coming. Duck! (See also the comments on Reich at the L.T.I. entry.)

Written Spanish almost always carries all necessary phonemic information, so anyone familiar with the phonology of the language but unfamiliar with the particular word is nevertheless able to pronounce the word fluently. The stress accent is either indicated (by un acento gráfico) or inferrable from simple rules. Diphthongs introduce some exceptions. In reino, the ei is pronounced in a single syllable, like a long a in English (/ei/ in the IPA). If it weren't, a graphical accent would indicate where the stress goes. When ei occurs early in a word with enough syllables, no accent is used to indicate the distinction. Thus, in the word reindustrialización, correct pronunciation depends on recognizing that re- is a prefix sounded as a syllable separate from the in that follows.

The more insufferable Brits used to pontificate about their being the Greeks to the American Romans. I'll give you a moment to guess how this could possibly be related to the subject of this entry. Time's up! The French have, or at least had, a metaphor about a French rider guiding the German horse that pulls the European cart. That was when the German economy was the locomotive of the European economy. Anyway, you don't need an engine to coast.

You should have thanked me for not writing ``iron horse.'' Now go to the French toast entry and learn about Ritter. (No, not ``fritters.'')

The term is ``made in Japan'' -- it's wasei eigo. It describes the lackadaisical condition of Japanese college education and the concomitant unserious attitude of Japanese college students, as these are widely preceived and much lamented. The term ``Disneyland'' is also used. Whoa! TMI! No need to rush into things. Relax, take it easy. What say we call it an entry and continue this discussion later?

The ka represents (is the pronunciation of) a kanji character that can mean something like -ization when used as a suffix. A bit more generally, when this character is suffixed to a term meaning `<foo>' it produces a noun meaning `the process of becoming <foo>.' However, the predicates (the terms meaning <foo>) that can be so suffixed is limited in ways that I cannot understand and that my Japanese informant cannot articulate. In isolation, the same kanji has meanings like `chemistry' and `transformation.' (By the way, there is another kanji with a reading ka that means `department' or, in context `academic department.' Alas, kaka does not mean `chemistry department.')

Another term that uses the transformation kanji as a suffix is shoshika. Shoshi here means `few children.' Breaking it down further, shi is a kanji meaning `child.' The same kanji can also be pronounced ko (see -ko entry). The first syllable is written with a kanji meaning, not surprisingly, `few.' There's another kanji, also pronounced sho, which means `small.' So if you only heard shoshi and didn't see it written, you might go a while thinking it meant `small child' or `small children.' Of course, the kanji pronounced shi could also mean `small' (yielding `few small' or `small small'), but here it doesn't. My Japanese informant tells me she's only ever known a single gaijin who is not merely a fluent speaker of Japanese (this is common), but also a competent reader and writer of the language. Finally combining less than all we have learned, we see that shoshika means `trend towards fewer children.' More precisely, we see what it means, and find it hard to express in unstilted English.

Coming back to rejârando-ka, it is worth identifying it as the flip side of the well-known ``cram culture'' of Japan: Japanese children study very hard in middle and high school to do well in the college entrance exams and get into the most prestigious possible college. Apparently, when they finally arrive at college they are exhausted or no longer willing to continue that grind. But rejârando is really two things: it is a lack of studiousness in young people enrolled in Japanese colleges, and it is the acceptance of this behavior by the colleges themselves. In principle, colleges might attempt to tighten standards and require more work for graduation. In practice, Japanese colleges are compliant or complicit in rejârando-ka. There are two kinds of reasons for this. (And please pardon me for vastly oversimplifying a complicated cultural phenomenon, etc.)

One reason for Japanese colleges' complicity is that nonrigorous college courses are easier not only for the students but for the professors. Of course, one isn't likely to find college administrators defending low standards on the grounds that it's convenient for the professors. The next best thing, however, is arguments that a relaxed college atmosphere is beneficial for the students, gives them time to think deeply, ponder, and all that crap. It sounds like pretty transparent rationalization to me. [For specific instances of such administrative attitudes, self-serving or not, see Japanese Higher Education as Myth, by Brian J. McVeigh (2002), p. 4 and passim.] Incidentally, this phenomenon is entirely unknown in US colleges and universities. I've taught at a few of them, so you can believe me.

Another reason for Japanese colleges' compliance in declining student effort brings us back to shoshika, which turns out to be related to rejârando-ka by more than just a shared final kanji. What a writing system, eh? Shoshika directly implies a shrinking pool of college applicants. Both directly through tuition and indirectly through state subsidies based in some way on enrollment, Japanese colleges depend on enrollments to thrive or survive. This goes without saying, but looking at the preceding sentence I see it's too late to not say it. Japan has too few students to support or justify the number of colleges it has. Most Japanese colleges, eager or desperate for higher enrollments, have little leverage to enforce tighter standards.

There has been some effort to recruit foreign students to Japanese colleges, but it hasn't been conspicuously successful. Chinese are probably the only large group of foreigners who can hope to master Japanese writing in reasonable time, and thus take fair advantage of a Japanese education. Some Chinese come as students and are unaccounted-for by the end of the semester. Illegal immigration is certainly less of a problem for Japan than for most other industrialized nations, but Japan is also less tolerant of it.

Beyond students' and educators' attitudes to rejârando-ka, the broader society's attitudes matter as well -- especially those of the parents and taxpayers who foot the bills, and the companies that hire the products. Perhaps the following accurately reflects those views. It's from p. 154 of Speed Tribes, in a chapter focused on students at Todai (the University of Tokyo -- Japan's most prestigious university).

[C]ollege in Japan has always provided the only period in a Japanese male's life when he will have guaranteed free time. After college, even for those destined for the good life, there will be the drudgery of a salaryman's long hours, the trudgery of long commutes, the demands implicit in launching a marriage and starting a family. In Japan almost everyone agrees that college is a fine time in which to do nothing. Especially at Todai. (One Todai alumnus, who played center field for the Todai baseball team until his graduation four years ago, laughed when asked if he ever studied while in college. What did he do, then? ``Baseball,'' he said. ``Baseball and drinking.'')

Incidentally, in referring to Japanese ``colleges'' throughout this entry, I have used college the loose sense. In Japanese, there is no distinction corresponding to the American one between colleges and universities. The native term daigaku and the English loan word karejji both correspond to the general sense of college.

Let me go!

REM sleep was discovered by Eugene Aserinsky and described in his 1953 dissertation, ``Eye Movements During Sleep,'' in partial fulfillment of requirements for a Ph.D. in physiology at the University of Chicago.

The frequency and duration of REM sleep episodes increases through the night; REM sleep overall encompasses about a fifth of the night. By ``night'' here I mean an extended period of sleep. Personally, I'm nocturnal, so my night happens on Japan Time.

It had been thought that dream sleep only occurred in higher animals -- to wit, placental mammals. That's been stretched a bit: REM has been observed in an oviparous marsupial, the famous duck-billed platipus.

Somebody has suggested that dreams are just the brain's way of making the the eyes move and get needed oxygen.

It's not clear why we dream, but then, it's not even clear why we sleep -- rest without loss of consciousness would undo fatigue.

In January 1997, Dan Rather was able to identify the attacker from photos as William Tager, convicted in 1994 for the murder of an NBC technician. By that time, the statute of limitations prevented charges being brought in the earlier crime. Rather commented ``Everybody's had their guess about what happened, and some have had fun with it. Now the facts are out. My biggest regret is, he wasn't caught before he killed somebody.''

You remember Barry Diller, the CEO of QVC Shopping Network (the cubic zirconium channel -- trinkets and schlock hyped in vague and ignorant terms for vague and ignorant insomniacs)? Now (1998) he's chairman of USA Networks, Inc., which owns Miami TV station WAMI. They have freak show of a program at midnight called ``Ken's Freakquency.'' Not all bad taste qualifies as camp.

When the band appeared on Late Night with David Letterman 1983 (this is in Letterman's pre-CBS days, when he was still widely considered cool), Peter Buck claimed they picked the name out of a dictionary, and that they liked it because it was so ambiguous. A suspicious story, but a common one. The Crickets chose their name from a dictionary, but they were specifically looking for arthropod names, as they had been influenced by the Spiders. (Later, the Beatles' search for a name was strongly influenced and eventually decided by the homage they wanted to pay to the Crickets.) One band that chose its name in part for its ambiguity was U2. In the circumstances, I'm not sure it would be correct to say that the group name REM has a specific expansion, like REM or rem, say. Elsewhere, the claim is that the name brain-storming process involved everyone getting drunk, if that explains anything. Read about it in this faq.

The mnemonic is NOT.

Here's a partial list:

1. et tu
   (Actually, it may be that Caesar said kai su, Brute.)
2. Heyyou!

There are estimated to be almost two TV remotes per person, or more than four per household, in the US today, but most of them are probably lost under sofa cushions. Come to think of it, I have a TV remote and I don't even own a TV. I keep it in my locker at the gym to mute the sets while I'm there. (I go in the small hours; no one is inconvenienced.)

The reason for the inversion of the order of the cee and the first ess in the acronym is self-evident: as written, the acronym pronunciation in (North and South) American Spanish is the same as renaces (`you are reborn'); the order implied by the expansion (renacses) has a hard cee sound and is a homophone of no word in Spanish.

In New York City, rent control was imposed as an emergency measure during WWII, and never allowed to lapse. In any town with many large buildings, the number of tenants is likely to outnumber landlords enormously and make rent control difficult to repeal. Today, the only people who can afford to live in much of Manhattan are the rich and the poor.

Price controls are widely understood to be a distortion that prevents markets from functioning properly. When price controls are in effect for very long, the tasks performed by the market's invisible hand require increased legislation and government administration. Rent plays the role of price in the housing market.

The argument for price controls is usually based on the failure of classical market conditions to obtain. Typically, the argument runs that supply is limited and that there are barriers to the entry of new suppliers into the market. In WWII USA, for example, the government artificially diverted production to war needs, but employees still (or more accurately again) were being paid. Hence temporary national price controls.

Some industries, particularly utilities, communication, shipping, and transportation, have apparently large barriers to entry. This may be due to an expensive distribution infrastructure, a large minimum size of customer base, or both. Hence: controlled ``natural'' monopolies, utilities rate commisions, the whole catastrophe. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, there has been a widespread change of view in the US about how natural the monopolies and how necessary the government control were.

Trucking was one of the industries for which the arguments mentioned above are weakest. But this is getting far afield. Maybe I'll add stuff later, but the only reason I put in this entry in the first place was to have a place to mention an early instance of rent control.

Documents from the early history of universities are a bit scarce, and reconstruction relies on a certain amount of conjecture. The earliest school in Christian Europe that can be called a university (or two universities) is the school of law at Bologna. It is hard to know exactly when it was founded, or when recognized as a formal entity. The earliest extant document is from 1158. Emperor Frederick I (1152-1190) issued a decree called the Habita which granted students (in the modern sense of that word) a special ecclesiastical jurisdiction. No, that has precious little to do with rent control, but hey: I'm all about context. Another of the early items of evidence is a document of 1189, issued by Clementine III (Pope from 1187 to 1191), which confirmed an existing legatine ordinance forbidding masters or scholars to offer to any landlord a higher rent for a house than the one paid by scholars already living there. Setting aside niceties of who is offering terms of a contract and who accepting, this is essentially a form of rent control.

where the prefactor K and exponent p are dimensionless constants which depend significantly on the kind of module considered. If you're still at Netscape 1 or equivalent, you needed to know that the l.c. p on the r.h.s. was superscripted to indicate exponentiation.

Robert C. Hupp worked at Oldsmobile from 1902 to 1906, then at Ford until 1908. He left and founded Hupp Motor Car Co. with his brother Louis in 1909, and the cars and company quickly came to be called Hupmobile(s). In 1911, the brothers sold their stock to the company officers. Robert Hupp planned to produce another Hupmobile car through his Hupp-Yeats Corp., but Hupp Motor Car Co. obtained a court order preventing the brothers from using the Hupp name on a gasoline-powered automobile. The Hupp name went on electric cars sold by Hupp-Yeats from 1912 to 1919 (Robert Hupp died in 1917); Hupp tried ``RCH'' for the gasoline cars.

The last Hupmobiles made by the original company were Skylarks, produced from 1938 to 1940 and based on recently defunct Cord's 810/812 vehicles. Buick also had a line called Skylark. There was probably an Olds-tagged version of that too.

Richard Wright had a nice article on Hupmobiles in the Nov. 29, 1999, Detroit News.

Many rock bands have taken names from vehicles and transportation systems, real and imagined. A couple that I can think of off-hand that we mention in this glossary are BTO and Grand Funk (GFR). Over in the early O's, we mention Jefferson Airplane under O. A couple of rock groups with non-transportation names are mentioned in the octane-number entry (hey, that's how it goes). We say nothing about Jefferson Starship, but we do mention the Starships Enterprise, and William Shatner's abortive rock vocals (in the deconstruction entry, naturally).

Okay, now we've thrown together a Led Zeppelin entry.

This entry is here because I forgot that I had a reps entry.

Got that? The kind of signal that should be called a repeater -- a slave signal that has the same aspect as a master signal -- is called a ``co-acting signal.''

1. Repeat once, so the thing is done or occurs twice, for a total of two repetitions. Less ambiguous term: ``repeat.''
2. Repeat again, a second time after the first repetition, so the thing is done or occurs thrice, including two repetitions. Less ambiguous term: ``threepeat.''

Popular in-season cruises are typically round trips, as the ships make a regular circuit in season. (Many passengers buy less than a round trip, of course.) Repositioning cruises are one-way. Regular-cruise passengers generally prefer cruises that make many port calls; repositioning cruises tend to spend longer periods (one or two weeks) at sea. However, the itineraries are not entirely utilitarian, since business may tail off in one area before picking up in another. Many ships repositioning from Alaska migrate to the Caribbean via Hawaii, and some ships migrate from the Caribbean to Europe with a detour to South America.

The price per diem of repositioning cruises is much lower than that of regular cruises, essentially to fill up the cabins for less-popular voyages that amount to a kind of overhead. Passengers at sea for long periods tend to spend more at the on-board casinos, shops, and bars, so the lines make up some of the discount this way.

You know, if you want to spend serious time at sea and you don't need the wallet-thinning distractions of a cruise ship, a cheap alternative is to book a cabin on a freighter. Don't expect Internet or cell-phone connectivity. It's something to try the next time you're struggling to finish a novel (writing one, that is). And if you're researching for your swashbuckler, by all means book a berth on that cargo ship around the horn of Africa.

Aiui, normally the passengers on a freighter eat in the mess with the crew. Normally also, for obvious practical reasons, the crew and officers all speak a common language, such as Korean. So this would be an opportunity to brush up on your Korean or other common language. You can probably also expect to eat Korean food, mutatis mutandis.

Specifically, RER trains operate from suburban locations into and across the city center, and serve as an express alternative to the RATP's Métro system for travel within the city. The RER accepts RATP tickets for travel within the city (transfers to/from the Métro are free), and has higher fares (by distance) for travel beyond.

It's a good approach, says Mark. The nearest thing he can think of to the RER in other places he's been is the S-Bahn in some German-speaking cities, but he doesn't remember any of them having the same type of fare integration. He could be misremembering about that, though.

Better visit RATP or this Métro guide.

This is only implemented in http; there is no RES for ftp, gopher or wais pages. On the other hand, most indexing internet spiders ignore non-http pages. (See Archie and Veronica.)

I first decided to write this entry using some of the time I saved by not trying to slog through Obituaries, a book ``by the internationally acclaimed writer, William Saroyan,'' as the back cover of the paperback edition describes him. The publisher number in the ISBN of this book is 916870, and the cover design is by someone with the first name of George, so it must have been pretty clear from the start that this book was a stinker. I don't know if any of his forty or so other works is any good, but I'm glad none of my friends has ever recommended any of them to read.

Obituaries is a rumination on the entries in the necrology register of Variety magazine for 1976. Not that he knew too many of them. He met 28 of the 200 or more (p. 3) or 27 of the 221 (p. 38) listed on page 164 of that special 71st anniversary issue January 5, 1977. (Variety has been published since 1905.)

Chapter 30 begins ``Next, Alexander Brailowsky was in music, on the cello, I believe, but I know nothing about him.'' Three pages later, chapter 31 begins ``And that brings us to Charles Brave, but I know absolutely nothing about him, though I believe I know a little something or other about being brave.''

In chapter 27, dedicated to Kermit Bloomgarden (whom he knew), he writes that Bloomgarden, ``in my memory, had something to do with that money-maker [Life with Father]. Why don't I just look it up? Because I don't look up. I am not a writer of popular history.

Here is the comprehensive resolute action parameter for the last decade:

1996:	6.0
1997:	6.6
1998:	4.8
1999:	8.4
2000:	7.0
2001:	8.3
2002:	7.8
2003:	4.9
2004:	9.2
2005:	7.7
2006:	2.0

It looks irresolute. Boring, actually. I've worked out a new improved comprehensive resolute action parameter. It's the number of articles with ``resolute action'' appearing anywhere in the headline or the leading paragraphs, minus the number of articles containing both ``speed'' and ``David Letterman'' in the headline or the leading paragraph, but otherwise it's the same. This c.r.a.p. has the advantage that I can do the arithmetic in my head. Okay, get ready, here are the results.

1996:	-8
1997:	+4
1998:	-5
1999:	+4
2000:	 0
2001:	+6
2002:	+1
2003:	 0
2004:	+3
2005:	-2
2006:	-5

This glossary has a large number of restaurant-related entries, and we'll be linking to an increasing number of them over time.

1. restaurant jargon
2. Waiting

• 86
  
• in the weeds
  This has become common outside the food service industry. A person is said to be ``in the weeds'' when overwhelmed with work. It's about the same as ``swamped'' in a general context, and the only sensible conjecture at an etymology that I am aware of is that it started out as a slightly punning ``in the reeds'' (relocating the swamping location from ship to shore), and that people who didn't understand the reference switched ``reeds'' to ``weeds.''
• two-top, three-top, ...
  As far as I know, this terminology is used in all US restaurants with a host or more than one server. A two-top is a table with two people sitting at it. The ``top'' may be thought of as coming from ``tabletop [settings].'' We
• back of the house
  The area of the restaurant that customers aren't welcome in. Mostly the kitchen and the area where orders are delivered to the kitchen and received and trayed.
  There's a Chinese restaurant in Elkhart, Indiana, that is oriented sideways: looking from the street, the left side of the building is the eating area, and the kitchen is on the right. I asked my waitress what they called the back of the house, and she answered ``What?''
• front of the house
  House \ (back of the house).
• monkey dish
  Everyone knows what this is, but no one knows how it got its name. Not being no one, I don't know either, but I'll venture a guess. It's just small enough for a monkey to grab with its hand. Anyway, it's good to have a term that doesn't suggest ``ash tray'' in any way.
• phase
  There are two dialects of restaurant: in one dialect, when traffic is too low to justify the staffing level and is not expected to rise again before the next shift change, an excess server may be cut early. In the other dialect, the verb ``to phase'' is used in place of `to cut.''
• ramekin
  At one point at my regular haunt, I realized that since they'd switched to metal ramekins from ceramic or plastic, I was getting less salad dressing ``on the side'' than I wanted with my small salad, so I started asking for the dressing ``in a monkey dish instead of a ramekin.'' The waitresses always understood me, so at first I didn't get any comments on my use of the word ``ramekin,'' but it turned out that I was talking a foreign dialect. Some of the waitresses knew it from working at other restaurants. And anyway, everyone knows what a monkey dish is. At another, similar restaurant (okay: Tradewinds, on McKinley), I was served by a guy who's usually a cook (working there 5-10 years) and who had just started working at a downtown bar. He only knew the word because he'd learned it working at the bar. started working
• backs
  Don't back up. Typically used to warn that someone is passing by carrying a tray.
• behind you
  Same as backs.

This paragraph isn't about restaurant jargon, but if you're reading this entry you'll probably want to read this too. It's about the Billy Joel song ``Piano Man.'' That includes this line: ``It's a pretty good crowd for a Saturday.'' For years the line didn't strike me in any particular way, until one day I thought -- wait: Saturday is the busiest night of the week. If it's a pretty good crowd for a Saturday, then it's a pretty good crowd for any day. Eventually, I chalked it up to scansion and the fact that no other day has three syllables, though if I'd been consulted I might have recommended ``for a Monday night'' (normally the lightest-trafficked of the week). A decade or so on, it occurred to me that ``pretty good for...'' should be understood (despite the manager's unaccountable smile) as ``not very good for...'' rather than as ``not so bad for....'' Problem solved.

Shaving cream works on a similar principle.

all ... approached the new situation with great apprehension. They dealt with the resulting situational stress in different ways: by going in a group, or with a friend who had already been to the restaurant, by ascribing various feelings and motivations to other diners, by claiming ownership of specific features, and by editing out or 'laughing off' negative aspects of the experience.

Johns and Kivela observed that their results confirmed and complemented those of previous studies. It was also consistent with some findings of Dr. Romance that I mention at the NAVS entry. There's something on the restaurant-sex nexus at many of the entries here that cite Waiting, particularly those headed
black bra,
Hold the onions, and
LBI.

I, of course, am experienced. I stride boldly into food-service situations (it's part of the Mission). See Excellent choice, sir!

England suffered a period of civil war in the 1640's. It was essentially a contest of power between Parliament and King Charles I. Charles I was executed in December 1649, following trial by the Rump (what Parliament was called after the army excluded Presbyterians and other less-anti-Royalist members), so you can probably guess who won that war.

Over the next decade, the UK went through various sorts of governments mostly dominated by Oliver Cromwell. He ultimately (1653) became dictator in a more formal way (``Lord Protector,'' first servant of the Commonwealth of England, along with Ireland and Scotland, which he had reconquered in 1649-1651). Cromwell died in 1658, and in 1660, parliament invited the heir of Charles I to return to England, where he was crowned king on April 23, 1661. (He was already Charles II: after his father's execution, he had been crowned at Scone in Scotland. He subsequently led Scottish forces to defeat against Cromwell and escaped to France.)

The beginning of the Restoration is generally dated to 1660, the year Charles II returned to England, rather than to 1661, when he was actually restored to the throne. As a historical period, the Restoration period is taken to end in 1685, when Charles II died, or 1688, when his younger brother and successor, James II, was overthrown in the Glorious Revolution. That marked the end of Stuart rule in Britain.

Although the political historians' Restoration period is fairly well-defined (viz., 1660-1685/8), the term is used in a looser sense by historians of drama, for a rather longer period. Cromwell and the Puritan-dominated Parliament of his period had imposed prohibitions on the operation of theaters. These were removed by Charles II, and a new period of drama began. The drama historians' Restoration period can be defined in two ways. In theater terms, the Restoration period is the period of ``Restoration drama.'' Whatever that is, it is said to comprise a dramatic tradition begun in the 1660's, weakening in the 1700's and tailing off in the 1730's. (Afaik, its greatest innovation was using women to play women's parts. Also, it included a lot of satire, much of it aimed at a fellow named Sir Robert Walpole. It also featured some mysterious cancellations, and performances stopped by the physical intervention of government officers.) For those who like sharp definitions that don't require a lot of messy artistic judgments, there is the alternative definition by which Restoration Drama is any play first produced between 1660 and 1737. The latter year marks the passage of Walpole's Stage Licensing Act. (This Walpole fellow was the king's prime minister or something.) This licensing act imposed a strict censorship that effectively suppressed production (and hence the writing) of plays. Satire -- did I mention that this was a dominant element of restoration drama? -- was substantially reduced in those plays that continued to be produced.

Charles II was succeeded by his brother because he had no legitimate children (old concept, I know) by his queen. He did have a number of illegitimate children, two of them by the actress Nell Gwyn. The political conflicts in England arose in significant part from religious conflicts. (That's conflicts between religions, you understand. Not some silly conflict regarding whether a king should be bound by the strictures of any religion he should happen to claim to adhere to.) In Oxford in 1681, Nell Gwyn famously placated an ugly crowd that attacked her coach by sticking her head out and saying ``Good people, you are mistaken; I am the Protestant whore!''

Extra free bonus information: another kind of remains, in the generalized sense of slight evidence left behind indicating earlier presence, is often called traces in English and rastro in Spanish.

Have a look at the faux ami entry.

Okay, that was Dr. A. Retentive speaking. The fact is, resumé and résumé are different words. Two-accent résumé is a synonym of CV, and its use indicates a morbid, pettifogging, unbusinesslike precision. In contrast, one-accent resumé is more businesslike; it indicates a readiness to compromise, a healthy orthographic insouciance, a ``whatever, let's just do it'' attitude.

Convert your curriculum vitae into a resumé. The difference? A resumé emphasizes the employer's needs rather than minute details of your credentials. “This change may not sound that large to you right now, but, done correctly, the process requires a seismic shift,” Basalla and Debelius write.

Of related interest, PARW/CC and NRWA.

Susanna S. discovered a great way to separate the hairs from the corn on the cob: nuke 'em! Don't even husk the ear, just cook the cob in its husk in the microwave oven. When you take it out and husk it, you'll see the hairs come off very easily. Now I don't know what to do with my pressure cooker.

P.S.: Don't try this with a coconut.

(Also REBT.)

A large part of political correctness (PC) consists of rewording -- an insistence or more on the use of preferred terms and avoidance of terms considered inappropriate. The idea is that the bad old terms are freighted with negative connotations, and that replacing those with spiffy new terms that are neutral or positive will change negative attitudes that were reinforced by the old words. There is something to this theory, and when major changes in public attitudes are occurring, new words or a new way of speaking can help promote the new attitudes, by providing a reformed language for indicating one's reformed attitudes. On the other hand, new words are neither necessary nor sufficient for producing new attitudes, and in many cases the main new attitude they produce will be resentment.

When the only thing that is new is terminology, the terminology is euphemism. A recurring instance of euphemism is in the terms used to describe the profoundly stupid. For much of the twentieth century, there have been efforts to produce a more respectful or sympathetic attitude to the stupid. Advocates and professionals have tried to do this by introducing new words, ``retarded'' being prominent among them. This word was supposed to suggest that the stupid are merely slower in achieving the same levels of intellectual competence as other people. (You mustn't say ``normal'' people! The invidious implication that anyone could be ``abnormal'' is too hurtful! Anyway, in any reasonable absolute measure of the phenomenon, stupidity is normal.)

The attempt to introduce the less stigmatizing term ``mentally retarded'' led directly to the creation of the pejorative slang noun ``retard'' (tarado in Spanish is unrelated). The reason is that no one who wasn't very stupid was fooled. People who are retarded stay retarded. It's true that a growing child who is mildly retarded, with an IQ of 80, say, merely requires about 25% longer than average to reach average levels of achievement. At age five, that child is developmentally four years old. As adulthood is approached, however, the retarded stop catching up -- they reach a plateau like everybody else, but the plateau is at a lower level. Permanently retarded sounds oxymoronic, if you'll excuse the expression, but it is the rule. Perhaps it is unfortunate that people don't just keep getting smarter indefinitely, and one can understand the desire to give a kind name to those who level off low, but the ultimate lesson of ``retarded'' is that euphemism is not an effective molder of popular perceptions (despite Orwell's fears).

When there's time, maybe we'll explain exceptional children, special [needs] children, challenged children, and slow watches, stupefaction, dumb, fool, clown, and alternate intelligences. For the time being, we have entries for sped and estúpido.

``Each issue of RETIARIUS will be published only in electronic form on the World Wide Web. No hard copies will be issued. Readers, of course, may print for themselves any part of RETIARIUS which especially interests them.'' The parts they find boring they can print five copies of and stuff in the boss's mail box. ``RETIARIUS will be published once a year.'' Despite the tremendous interest.

``Latin (simple, clear, grammatically correct Latin) is the required language for all contributions.''

Go, run, get your contributions in soon.

When the trauma is due to a traffic accident, it is often easy to determine the time elapsed between the last recoverable memory and the moment of the head injury. For example, in the case of my accident in 1984, where I was completely unconscious for perhaps fifteen minutes, and there was no skull or jaw fracture but there was a noticeable change in, like, cerebral potassium kinase I think it was, I remember exactly where I was when I had the very last thought I can recall from before the one-car accident. (The thought was ``gee, I'm feeling pretty tired. I need to find a place to pull over and take a nap.'') At the hospital, they kept asking me what day it was (January 4), like I might forget.

Another is landline, for most instances of what used to be called a (telephone) line. (The terms ``line'' and ``landline'' have both a concrete sense, as the physical connection, and a more abstract sense referring to the arrangements associated with the assignment of a telephone number.) The word landline is not as clear-cut as the other examples, because radio telephones, which are not (or are not attached to) landlines, existed for a long time before cell phones. If radio telephones had become common, then perhaps the term landline might have emerged earlier.

Progress has overtaken ``cell phone'' as well. It had already begun to be called ``cell'' when smartphones lead to the creation of the retronym ``feature phone,'' a euphemism for a phone where any poor little approximation to the functionality of a smartphone is a ``feature,'' apparently.

New discoveries in science regularly lead to the creation of retronyms. The emergence of what has come to be called ``dark matter'' led to the new term ``bright matter'' for what used to be simply ``matter.'' New techniques in science also give rise to retronyms; since the development of ICDR, good ol' ICR must sometimes be distinguished as ICSR.

If you were looking for a term for acronym expansions retroactively assigned, the term you want is probably either backronym or stealth backronym. Incidentally, there are in fact electric guitars that are rather less acoustic than ordinary electric and acoustic guitars; see the discussion of silent guitars s.v. backboard.

An interestingly problematic instance of retronymy concerns mathematics. The earliest sort of mathematics was practical, or what we now call ``applied mathematics.'' The term is awkward. The University of Cambridge actually has a ``Department of Pure Mathematics,'' but usually it is applied mathematics that must be marked by a modifier. I was going to write that, after a couple of thousand or a couple of hundred years, I guessed that's pretty reasonable. But the bifurcation has been gradual.

Just to dot the tees and cross the eyes: Retsyn consists of partially hydrogenated cottonseed oil, some flavoring (with soy lecithin), and copper gluconate. I can't find any medical studies directly relating to this substance, but gee-- it sure sounds pharamaceutical!

The REU programs highlight most clearly the mission conflict faced both by NSF and by ``Research Universities.'' They are supposed to further both education and research, and it is uncomfortable to admit that many decisions represent a compromise between these goals. Few undergraduates are at a point in their education where they can contribute to research in a way that benefits them educationally. Not that washing test tubes, sacrificing lab animals, and typing the command "run," are not a necessary part of the educational experience, of course. However, experience has demonstrated that these skills can be learned more rapidly at the graduate level, possibly while learning some other, less menial skills.

REU money is relatively easy to get once you have an NSF grant. Most universities provide various entertainments (safety training, health training, sensitivity training, parties to celebrate the end of training) that take up most of the REU students' time and limit the damage they might do in the lab. If you have a promising student who you want to have do some work, hire him on the main grant money. If he's smart, he'll study high-temperature, high-speed processing of potatoes at McDonald's instead and drop by the lab occasionally and tell you about it.

This contemplation is My Ching, a possessive version of the famous mystical reference work. (Correct pronunciation ``mee ching,'' of course.)

Cf. Dyslexic Occultist.

You know, the incident alluded to in the first paragraph occurred around 1995 at the Talking Leaves bookstore (across Main Street from the Main Street Campus of the University of Buffalo). In 2002, Kim Chuen Lam and Kai Sin Lam came out with The Way of Tea: The Sublime Art of Oriental Tea Drinking. It was published as part of the Barrons Educational Series. Get me outta here! I'm trapped on a crazy world!

Doctor, after the operation on my hands, will I be able to play the piano?

Reassured that he will, he exults

Oh wonderful! I always wanted to be able to play the piano.

Oh wait! Wrong definition. This was supposed to say ``Sounds good, but what if it wasn't vital in the first place?''

More on piano-playing at the ABPT entry.

Elitism.

Reminds me of high-powered rifles. Mnemonic: kings delegate.

Jauss observed that we cannot experience literature from a different age as it was experienced at the time of its production, because we are different and the work therefore has a different aesthetic effect on us. As tools for discussing this, he introduces the terms ``aesthetic distance'' and ``horizon of expectation.'' The latter term describes the imaginary point in time where the expectations of later readers last meet the authors' expections of being understood, roughly speaking. In trying to understand the ideas behind the terms it might be a mistake to try to relate the ideas closely to the conventional meanings of the words chosen, particularly horizon. Both terms are fairly obvious allusions to terms popularized in the physical theory of general relativity (GR), especially ``event horizon.'' That is, the relativistic event horizon is a metaphor for Jauss's ``horizon of expectation.''

Event horizon in turn uses earth horizon metaphorically as the place beyond which we can't see: Basically, if an event happens far away and recently, we can't know about it because news of the event traveling as fast as possible (light speed c) hasn't had enough time to reach us. (Future events are also unknown because they require news traveling even faster -- see FLT entry.) Events in the past that are not so far away, conversely, we can know about. The imaginary border in spacetime between those events we can know about and those we can't know about is called the event horizon. (Event horizons get weird near black holes; that could also be used metaphorically.)

Jauss's aesthetic distance is evidently analogous to relativistic ``proper distance,'' but the analogy is a bit rough because aesthetic distance increases with distance in both time and space, whereas proper time does not. [In ``flat'' Minkowski space, which is described by special relativity (SR), the squared proper distance is the square of the spatial distance minus the square of the time separation between two events.]

Reasons for making the analogy with event horizon rather than earth horizon include: (a) mere height/prominence cannot overcome an event horizon, (b) the event horizon arises from distance itself, rather than from some intervening body (like the earth), (c) relativity is mysterious and scientific and associated with a famous long-hair, so event horizons are cool, while ordinary horizons may be beautiful, but they're pretty common and not cool.

How well Jauss understood the physical concepts and how closely he modeled his theory on the physical one, I don't know, but the natural interpretation is that he imagined aesthetic distance increasing as audience gets further away from a text in time and/or cultural space, until a point of incomprehensibility (failure of expectations?) is reached. Obviously, the location of the Jauss horizon will not be so sharply defined as that of a relativistic event horizon.

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

Entry points for these can be found at OSU.

RFE was established in 1949, and reined in in 1956 after it was perceived (apparently largely incorrectly, it later turned out) that RFE broadcasts had misled Hungarians into believing that a rebellion would trigger Western intervention.

In 1973 the Board for International Broadcasting (BIB) was created to oversee the RFE and RL, and in 1975 those were merged to become RFE/RL. Related programs are Radio Martí (est. 1983, operational 1985), TV Martí (operational in 1990), Radio Free Asia, broadcasts to various parts of Africa and Asia.

A recent history of the stations was published by Arch Puddington: Broadcasting Freedom: The Cold War Triumph of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty (U.P. of Kentucky, 2000), 382 pp.

Italian classics journal catalogued by TOCS-IN.

• BLRG (broad-line)
• LERG (low-excitation)
• NLRG (narrow-line)

I enter this definition with a pang of regret, because its wider use or even familiarity would reduce the frequency of some of my favorite homonym errors (``Isabella, who rained in Spain,'' ``Henry VIII, who reined in the Church as well,'' etc.). You'd like 'em too. Tell you what: keep this abbreviation under your hat, and under no circumstances, whatever you do, should you dare reveal the existence of this glossary to any esteemed member of our entertaining fourth estate. It'll be our secret -- just between you and me and a couple of thousand other visitors per day.

De Imperatoribus Romanis is ``An Online Encyclopedia of Roman Emperors.'' There's a biographical essay and bibliography for every emperor. You probably also want to see the website on The Cardinals of the Holy Roman Church. ``A digital resource created and produced by Salvador Miranda, consisting of the biographies of the 20th century cardinals and of the events and documents concerning the origin of the Roman cardinalate and its historical evolution.''

Cf. DGA.

Arizona State University (ASU) has its main campus in Tempe. The microelectronics clean room there, like those elsewhere, uses dehumidifiers. Unlike most, however, it also has humidifiers.

``It's not the heat, it's the humidity.''

Rhodium has an atomic number of 45 and is named after Rhoda, a television show starring Valerie Harper that was spun off of the Mary Tyler Moore. Okay, let me check that now... Well, this is true: the names Rhoda and Rhodium are both derived from rhódon, the Greek word for `rose.' (It occurs in Homer's famous repeated phrase Englished as ``rosy-fingered dawn.'') Close enough. William Wollaston discovered the metal in 1804. As he explained in the Philosophical Transactions, vol. 94, p. 419, ``I design in the present Memoir to prove the existence ... of another metal, hitherto unknown, which may not improperly be distinguished by the name of Rhodium, from the rose-colour of a dilute solution of the salts containing it.'' The metal itself is ``white'' (as that word is applied to metals). It is one of the platinum-group metals.

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