U u

One U equals 1.75 inches (44.45 mm). That's the distance between mounting-hole clusters on the (vertical) mounting rails. There are three screw-holes in the rail per cluster, and if your unit is only one U tall, you are well-advised to use four screws: top and bottom on each side. As illustrated here, there is a slightly uneven distance between adjacent mounting holes: the upper and lower mounting holes are five eighths of an inch (5/8 in.) center hole (distances given between centers of holes); there is a center-to-center spacing of only one half inch between the top hole of a cluster and the bottom hole of the cluster above it.

Traditionally also, the inside distance between mounting rails is about 450mm (17.72 inches). The idea is to mount them on screws, not squeeze them hard up against the rails, so this distance isn't so critical. They're called 19-inch racks because that's the horizontal center-to-center spacing of the screws, but there's relatively more play in that distance. The holes in the supporting front panel are not exactly circular: they're horizontal slots.

As you may be realizing by now, the ``standard'' electronics rack is not so standard. For deeper, heavier equipment, you buy racks with four vertical rails, so the equipment can be supported at the back. This is pretty handy for some of the heavier equipment, that may be just as deep as it is wide. Worse, the transformer, often the heaviest single piece, is typically with the rest of the power supply, towards the back.

Racks with back support usually have horizontal rails connecting the front and back vertical bars. The cross-section shape of these rails varies; HP alone has both C-type and J-type, and their J-type is not exactly the same as that of Tektronix. Tektronix rack-mount equipment frequently comes in slide drawers, and their nicer stuff folds down to expose the rear panel for easy servicing.

It's the usual story with standards: if one standard is good, then many standards must be very good. And here's a laugh: HP racks have their own serial numbers.

There's also a standard form of the plaint that there are too many standards. The relevant sentence above is supposed to read ``...usual story with standards: so many to choose from.''

Some universities are known by full names of the form ``University of <place>,'' yet have common abbreviations with U representing university in which U is not the initial initial. The only case in which I've attempted to nail down the origin is that of the University of Denver (see DU). Others include

• KU (Kansas)
• MU (Mizzou)
• OU (Oklahoma)

In the US, to a degree, a university is a college that offers post-baccalaureate degrees. According to a more popular definition a university is ``a college with a football team.'' Neither of these definitions holds uniformly.

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

Anyway, as a dictionary abbreviation, úsase clearly has the sense `it is used,' where it refers to the term defined, and there are many abbreviations built on it, like ú. t. c. s.: `úsase tambié como sustantivo, `also used as a noun.' That usually refers to an adjective. For example, alto means `tall,' but is also used as a noun meaning `tall person, tall one.' In many cases, the gender is obvious from the ending, especially -o/-a forms like alto/alta, `tall male, tall female.' (These are typically derived from Latin adjectives of the first and second declension.) Other adjectives have a common form for both genders. (Without thinking about it too hard, I suppose these are often derived from Latin third-declension adjectives.) For these cases, one can use more explicit abbreviations, such as ú. c. s. f. (úsase como sustantivo femenino, `used as a feminine noun.'

``UAA is the successor organization to the Council of University Institutes for Urban Affairs, formed in Boston in 1969 by a group of directors of university urban programs. As urban affairs developed as a professional and academic field, the need for an organization that welcomed urban faculty, professionals, and students as well as urban program directors and deans became increasingly apparent. In recognition of this need, in 1981 the organization's name was changed to the Urban Affairs Association. Today, UAA includes institutional, individual and student members from colleges and universities throughout North America, Europe and Asia. Among its other activities, UAA sponsors the Journal of Urban Affairs.''

Come think of it, that seems to be the understanding of treaties in the Middle East: infinitely subject to renegotiation. I think that one way to deal with this would be, when their side proposes post-negotiation changes beneficial to them, our side should offer post-negotiation changes detrimental to them. Otherwise, they'll always see the advantages, and never the costs, of nonadherence to agreements.

In the September ENCOUNTER, Miss Nancy Mitford referred to a learned article by Professor Alan S. C. Ross (who occupies the Chair of Linguistics in the University of Birmingham) on "Linguistic Class-Indicators in Present-Day English," published in "Neuphilologische Mitteilungen" (a well-known Finnish philological periodical published by Uusfilologinen Yhdistys). In view of the extraordinary interest that Miss Mitford's essay provoked, we think our readers will be interested in the following extracts from Professor Ross's article. We have been forced to omit some over-technical sections on phonetics, and Professor Ross has been kind enough to revise a few of the other sections so as to make them more easily comprehensible to the lay reader.
    We should like to apologise to our readers and would-be readers for having been unable to fulfil their many requests for copies of the September issue, which was sold out immediately after publication. We have, however, prepared a special reprint of Miss Mitford's essay on "The English Aristocracy," which will be sent to those who write for it, enclosing 2½d. in stamps to cover postage.

There is a little confusion about the original article which I would like to clear up. Nancy Mitford's article (the lead article in the September issue, pp. 5-12) cited A.S.C. Ross's paper (on p. 6) as ``Upper Class English Usage,'' in Bulletin de la Société Néo-philologique de Helsinki. It's an understandable confusion: when the journal was begun, its title was in German, as given earlier in this entry, and professional linguists continued to know it by that title. By 1954, however, the title page included the French title cited by Mitford. The German title continued to appear at the top of the page, but the French title below it was in a larger font. Today the journal's title (and inside-front-cover submission instructions) appear in German, French, and Spanish. It continues to cause confusion. Until I pointed it out to the reference librarians (just this week while writing this entry) the French and English titles were listed in the ``issuing body field'' and the German name of the society was given in the dative (in the ``imprint'' field) as it appears in a prepositional phrase on the title page. The reference librarian asks if I am a cataloger. I tell her what my last German teacher told me his German teacher told him: ``Hey, wanna be a translator? The pay is poor, but the work is tedious!''

I want you to realize that I've been pretty good about this. Normally I would be obtuse or oblique or obscure and send you to the Neuphilologische Mitteilungen entry, where you'd have to plow through many long and irrelevant paragraphs before you got an explanation of that multiple-title business. So considering what a swell guy I've been, why don't you be nice and follow this link?

Uusfilologinen Yhdistys also publishes Mémoires de la Société Néo-philologique de Helsinki.

Mitford's article unleashed a flood of creative writing on this subject, published in 1956 in a thin volume edited by her, entitled Noblesse Oblige - An Enquiry into the Identifiable Characteristics of the English Aristocracy.

No! Thou art; U R.

In the January 2007 Proceedings of the IEEE there's an invited paper (pp. 92ff) by T. Samad, J. S. Bay, and D. Godbole, entitled ``Network-Centric Systems for Military Operations in Urban Terrain: The Role of UAVs.'' According to the abstract, small UAV's ``that can operate autonomously, in coordinated groups, are being designed to provide surveillance and reconnaissance for fighting wars in urban areas.''

Entire squadrons of drones. Great, now if we could arrange to have robot armies fight unmanned urban guerrilla forces in entirely automated cities away from any population centers, war would finally be the civilized game it was meant to be.

On October 20, 2004, Connecticut's Board of Higher Education gave UB its approval for a bachelor's degree program in martial arts. The program of studies covers ``the theory and practice of martial arts, incorporating study of world religions, international political economy and diplomacy, literature and civilization.'' Today's guest lecturer, David Carradine. Thomas Ward, dean of UB's International College explained that it's ``a liberal art with a specific focus in martial arts.'' It's like music or painting, but with greater impact. Students will be required to take at least 12 credits in Chinese, Japanese, or Korean. A few East Asian schools offer a bachelor's degree in martial arts, but in the US this is apparently a first. (Indiana University does offer a certificate in martial arts.)

Have a look at our seal. Don't ask me what ``spe'' stands for. [I also don't know what the magen David in the seal of Notre Dame University (South Bend) stands for.]

None of this is very important, of course, unless you become a UB student.

For something not so simple-minded as the above, read Barbara W. Tuchman: The Zimmermann Telegram (revised edition 1966), which is essentially about how the US got into the war. She argues that the revelation of German diplomatic efforts to instigate and abet a joint Japanese/Mexican invasion of the American Southwest was crucial: by galvanizing US opinion against Germany overnight, it brought the US into WWI many months earlier than would otherwise have been the case, and those unknowable months may well have been crucial. One can never know.

The U-Boot was very effective in WWII during a period known as ``the happy time,'' but later in the war, countermeasure developments, particularly radar, turned them into big coffins.

One or more readers have wondered: ``why was this known as `the happy time'? It can't have been very happy for the people in the sunk boats.'' Well, I didn't say it was ``the happy time'' for everyone. It wasn't ``coffins'' for everyone either.

ABR (q.v.) and UBR are the two ATM ``best-effort'' service types, a sort of steerage class of data transmission, in which the network makes no absolute guarantee of cell delivery. In UBR, there are no guarantees of any sort. To make a railroad analogy, if ABR is second-class service, UBR is riding on top of the cars.

BTW, although I didn't see the complete lyrics anywhere on the web, I did see that many sites quote ``We're going down to Liverpool and do nothing, all the days of our lives.'' No. It was a four-part harmony (in the version of Katrina and the Waves), but the lyrics were in the singular. (``I'm goin'... all the days of my life.'') Apparently it caused a stir in Liverpool -- TV interviews with an indignant mayor, all that.

I once had a friend who had attended a small high school, where she was a cheerleader. Later she became a Sandinista symp. One doesn't normally associate left activism with cheerleading, somehow. Cf. Buffalo Jills entry. 'Course, in a small school the various chores fall on a small number of available student personnel.

UCAID proudly claims that the ``Internet2 project is being led by over 130 research universities....'' This is oxymoronic, and maybe not so oxy.

Back in the thirties, with about 15,000 students, this was still the University of California, what we call UCLA was still called ``the Southern Branch'' and Davis was home of ``the Aggy school''

School teams at Berkeley are called ``the Bruins.'' The state flag of California is basically a picture of a Bear.

The first version of the model code was only issued in 1952. The UCC has since been adopted, with some local variations, by all fifty US states, the District of Columbia, and the US Virgin Islands. The state of Louisiana has adopted only articles 1, 3-5, and 7-9 of 11 (but 10 and 11 just have to do with timing of adoption and how the transition is handled; article 2 covers sales and leases, article 6 bulk transfers). Louisiana, because of its Spanish and French colonial history, has a legacy of Roman Law, and is legally exceptional in many respects.

When I first saw the team name in a cursive script on a UCI baseball jersey, I did a double-take, a triple-take, and an n-tuple-take, where n tended to infinity. I tried to get my eyes to see ``Gators,'' as if Irvine were in a different state of sunshine, but it wouldn't work. Fans in the bleachers held up signs with ``EATER NATION'' written in can't-mistake-it block letters. It turns out that the team mascots and official teams name are Anteaters. (I purposely made the last sentence awkward so as to avoid grammatical-number problems, and also to avoid having to write a second sentence. It didn't work.)

There's a Francophone mailing list for classics at UCL called AgoraClass, l'AGORA des Classiques.

What many people want to know is, why is it called ``University College''? The reasons have to do with the religious-contentious history of the place.

In America this is always pronounced as an initialism. (``You see el-AY.'') ``Oo-klah'' has been heard in France among some whose familiarity with UCLA is based on tee shirts. UCLA is one school in the University of California system, which includes UCB (also ``Cal'') (Berkeley), UCD (Davis), UCI (Irvine), UCR (Riverside), UCSB (Santa Barbara), UCSC (Santa Cruz), UCSD(San Diego), and UCSF (San Francisco). The state of California also has a separate system of State Colleges.

UCO is in Edmond, OK?

I remember in 8th-grade US history class with Mr. Rosenblatt the assistant varsity football coach, how he made sure to make clear that these were crime reports that represented crime statistics in a way that was uniform across jurisdictions with differing laws and in particular different crime definitions, and that it did not refer to crimes committed by people in uniform. As the FBI says,

The Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program was conceived in 1929 by the International Association of Chiefs of Police to meet a need for reliable, uniform crime statistics for the nation. In 1930, the FBI was tasked with collecting, publishing, and archiving those statistics. Today, several annual statistical publications, such as the comprehensive Crime in the United States [CIUS], are produced from data provided by nearly 17,000 law enforcement agencies across the United States.

If you like, you can think of the word radical now as expressing a concept closer to `fundamentalist' in a political sense. The other major party is the Peronists (PJ).

Bill Simmon's UCR list is longer than the list of TV programs I could name, and this is just a sideline to his sports commentary. The man is dedicated!

Back when I was in charge of inviting speakers for one of the regular seminars at UB, I had Gary over to talk about whatever it was that he was researching at the time. As we walked through the campus halls, he remarked in wonder that there were students studying everywhere. It was true -- in the library, on the grass, on the floor along the wall between classroom doors -- there were a lot of serious students. A beautiful sight. On one of my visits to Santa Barbara (actually the current one, August 2003, as I write this; toward the end of Summer Session) I happened to eat at the Denny's on State Street on a number of late evenings/early mornings, and every night the place filled with UCSB students studying. On Saturday night there was a table playing some knowledge-challenge game. I bought a UCSB cap and tee shirt. The UCSB teams name is Gauchos.

Why doesn't everyone just use the LC system? That's flexible enough and convenient for me.

You probably want to know more about Henri La Fontaine, Belgian Nobel Prize Laureate. With a genius behind this effort, you gotta figure this UDC is a brilliant piece of work. From his biography at the Nobel e-Museum I see that his achievements were in the area of peace. I was going to continue this entry in a light, humorous, tongue-in-cheek tone, but frankly, the hypocrisy and inanity of Nobel peace prizes makes me gag. Let's just say that La Fontaine was a politician with fine intentions and no meaningful achievements. In 1901, he asked the Belgian government to demand arbitration between the contending [white] sides of the Boer War. Did he ever condemn the genocide of black Africans wrought by Belgian colonialism? (That was a rhetorical question. A joke.) He was known as a strong proponent of internationalism, in a time when international agreement would have been largely a consensus of monarchs, dictators, and assorted uncrowned scoundrels. The faith that some have had in the procedural-reform road to the bureaucracy of utopia is only a more acute form of the delusion that a law can make any fact [discussed (disgust?) here].

Eight months after he received the Nobel prize, WWI engulfed his country. Before he went into politics, he was a bibliographer.

Nothing here should be taken to suggest that La Fontaine did not earn his laurel. By the terms of Alfred Nobel's will, the peace prize should go to the person who ``shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.'' After sifting through the rubble of those ors and ands, one doubtless finds that his yeoman conferencing work put him head and shoulders above the fools who make peace by defeating invaders.

Peace is as easy as surrender. Neville Chamberlain deserved the prize as much as anyone.

This started out to be an entry about UDC, didn't it? I can't remember. Let's meet at the UDCC entry later and try again, shall we?

The SBF Eco expert's grandson, reviewing his observations at the fair (see Grandparents' Day) recalled the balloons (cf. balloon smuggler) he observed at the milk cow exhibit. If you're reading this, you can't be too busy. Why don't you read the au pis entry too?

On November 11, of all days, in 1965, Southern Rhodesian Prime Minister Ian Smith made a UDI. The uni- here referred to the fact that the British, who were granting independence to all their African colonies in those years, were not invited to participate in determining the form of government Rhodesia would have after independence. I think this had something to do with race. Yes, I'm pretty sure of it, I don't think I'll even bother to look it up, just like I didn't bother to look up the approximate stuff I put in the .zw entry for Zimbabwe. There is a little bit of the antecedent history of Rhodesia at the NIBMAR entry.

Mr. Smith was a great advocate of democracy for the white population. In 1980, a British team negotiated an end to the civil war over majority rule, a bilateral declaration was issued, and Rhodesia became Zimbabwe. Ian Smith even had a (white minority party) seat in the national legislature. As I pass by this entry in 2005 and 2006, I observe that Zimbabwe has really been racking up the bad decades.

While it was in force, newspapers often referred to the UDI as Smith's ``declaration of UDI.'' They say that time wounds all heels, but I'm not sure. It's clear, though, that time can heal an acronym AAP pleonasm.

In Spanish, the letter wye (y) used as consonant and the double-el (ll) have the same sound almost everywhere Spanish is spoken, but that same sound is different in different places. In most of Mexico and Spain, the sound is a glide that you might write as a consonantal wye in English, or /j/ in the IPA. In Puerto Rico it's more like the jay sound in English, and in Argentina it's the zh sound, identical with the sound of j in French, or of the ess in standard English pronunciations of elision. The ess in Asia or Rhodesia is similarly pronounced either as zh or zee. In Spanish, the word rodilla means `knee.'

The year 1980 was an important moment in US history, a post-WWII nadir, and Rhodesia was part of that moment. More on that later; I may actually look something up. When I was a kid in elementary school, it was hard to suspect, let alone understand, that the US that emerged triumphant from WWII only twenty years before had been back on its heels in 1942, truly fearful of Japanese attack, and thinking but not uttering the word defeat.

The UDI attempted to achieve something similar to the American Declaration of Independence of 1776, and is more and less loosely patterned on that earlier document. One of the closer similarities is the inclusion of a catalog of grievances (shorter than, but similar in some content to, that of the American declaration) and a claim that the declarers have made a good-faith effort to avoid the rupture. Probably the closest resonance is in the opening:

Whereas in the course of human affairs history has shown that it may become necessary for a people to resolve the political affiliations which have connected them with another people and to assume amongst other nations the separate and equal status to which they are entitled:

And whereas in such event a respect for the opinions of mankind requires them to declare to other nations the causes which impel them to assume full responsibility for their own affairs:

Now therefore, we, the Government of Rhodesia, do hereby declare:

For comparison, here is the opening of the 1776 declaration:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

To most Americans, I imagine, Ian Smith's imitation looks like ugly travesty, and not just for aesthetic reasons. It can stir the melancholy thought that authors of the two declarations shared a straitened view of whom God or some unnamed authority had entitled to benefit from separate and equal status.

A small comment is in order about the word por. The Spanish prepositions para and por can both often be translated by the English word `for' (and the German für, for that matter). The preposition para means `for' in the sense of `for the purpose of.' (Hence ¿para qué? means `what for?') The preposition por means `for' in the sense of `in favor of' (or `for the purposes of,' so to speak). That's why por is the word in Unión por Chile. (This would be translated -- the expression is awkward in English -- as `Union for Chile'; `United for Chile' would be more natural, if less literal. For a similar construction in French, see RPR. For an expression using French pour in the Spanish para sense, see SUPRAS.) Of course, both prepositions have other meanings. For example, the instruction para la derecha means `to the right' (the semantic overlap is imprecise, and both languages have related expressions that carve up the neighborhood of related meanings a bit differently). The instruction por la derecha means (approximately, of course) `via, or by, the right side, going along the right.' (There's a little more on por at its own entry.)

It's also called asymmetric dimethylhydrazine. In English, of course, unsymmetric is a rare alternative to asymetric. However, a lot of the early research on hypergolics was done in Germany. As it happens, however, asymmetrisch is standard German, and unsymmetrisch is just as selten auf Deutsch wie auf Englisch, which just explodes my first theory of how the UDMH name came about.

``United Educators is a licensed insurance company owned and governed by approximately 1,000 member colleges, universities, independent schools, and related organizations throughout the United States. Our members range from small, private schools to multi-campus state universities.''

Welcome! Now go away!

We badly need an internet-capable ``football'' reporter.

UEFA - We care about Football.

The University of London Animal Welfare Society (ULAWS) was founded in 1926 by Maj. Charles W. Hume. In 1938, UFAW was created to expand membership, with ULAWS (no longer referred to by the original name or initialism) becoming UFAW's first branch.

The term UFH is used because the low-molecular-weight fractions (LMWH) also have medical application. LMWH's generally perform the same function as UFH, but have longer half-lives (which may be an advantage or not) and have different patterns of side-effects and drug interactions than UFH [e.g. lower rates of immune-mediated heparin-induced thrombocytopenia (HIT)].

There's a UFO's-and-Aliens FAQ associated with the alt.alien.visitors newsgroup.

FUFOR awards small cash prizes for UFO research (see news note).

The movie The Abyss includes the following dialogue:

Lindsay Brigman: There is something down there. Something not us.
Catfish De Vries: You could be more specific.
Lindsay Brigman: Not us. Not human, get it? Something non-human but intelligent ... A non-terrestrial intelligence.
Alan "Hippy" Carnes: A non-terrestrial intelligence? NTIs. Oh man, that's better than UFOs. Oh, but that works too, huh? "Underwater Flying Objects".

Must have been octopi or porpoises.

With more than 140,000 members, the UFT is the sole bargaining agent for most of the non-supervisory educators who work in the New York City public schools. It represents approximately 74,000 teachers and 17,000 classroom paraprofessionals, along with school secretaries, attendance teachers, guidance counselors, psychologists, social workers, education evaluators, nurses, laboratory technicians, adult education teachers and 32,000 retired members.

The UFT also represents teachers and other employees of some private educational institutions. The allied Federation of Nurses/UFT represents some 2,500 registered nurses of the New York City Visiting Nurse Service and several private New York City hospitals and health care institutions.

Uga! Uga! Uga shaka... I can't fight this feelin' ...

``The University of Georgia, a land-grant and sea-grant university with state-wide commitments and responsibilities, is the state's flagship institution of higher education. [It certainly seems appropriate for a sea-grant university to be a flagship, but does that make up for the handicap of being 200 miles from the sea?] It is also the state's oldest, most comprehensive and most diversified institution of higher education. Its motto, `to teach, to serve and to inquire into the nature of things,' [that probably sounds a lot more exalted in the original Latin] reflects the university's integral and unique [etc.].''

UGA is located in Athens, about 50 miles east of Atlanta. It was incorporated by the state's general assembly in 1785. (About that A in UGA: It's true that UGA is located at Athens. But then, Ohio University is also located in Athens -- coincidence, of course -- and it's not called OUA. Not even UOA.)

In fact, truly unrestricted Hartree Fock minimizes the Ritz energy functional in the space of Slater determinants of single-particle states. This honest HF suffers from a disease called the symmetry dilemma -- that is, the HF operator does not generally commute with angular momentum operators (spin and orbital) even when the true Hamiltonian operator does. The UHF procedure solves part of this problem -- the spin noncommutation -- by restricting the orbitals in the Slater determinant to be s_z eigenstates (i.e., they are simple products of a Pauli spinor with a function of position). With a fixed number of orbitals are assigned spin up, and the remainder spin down, the UHF wavefunction is an eigenstate of the z component of total spin, S_z.

For more revelations, see RHF.

Many languages, including Korean and Chinese, use an extended shwa as English does.

Filled Pause Web Links is a good page on this stuff.

Oh wait -- a correction has come in:

That's SHAMPOO-Banana!

Sorry about that.

In fact, a lot of shampoos have a fragrance between apple and banana, because the ester amyl acetate, which is a major component of the odor of ripe apples and bananas, has good cleaning properties. When I used to make MWPC's, one of the cleaning stages used amyl acetate. (The wires had to be very clean and smooth so they wouldn't have false signals due to spontaneous dielectric breakdown.)

Aristotle used to write while holding a heavy weight in his other hand. When he fell asleep, he would drop the weight, which would wake him up so he could get back to work. They said that Socrates was ugly, but Ari must have looked like a crab. Rube Goldberg was a later philosopher who also was a less-than-ideal upstairs neighbor.

The House of Windsor began its reign in Britain, and the Communist party its rule in Russia, in 1917. The House of Windsor has won the endurance contest, but by how much?

Actually, in England it was the same old house, with a duplex division put in during a family feud called World War I (WWI). What happened was that the royal houses of the UK, Germany, Russia, and many other countries were connected through marriage. Just a few years before the war, in fact, Britain's King George V and Tsar Nicholas II of Russia were guests at the wedding of a daughter of Kaiser Wilhelm II. (If you missed this when it was in the society pages, you can find details in A Distant Thunder, memoir of the Kaiser's children's English tutor.) At the time, George V's dynasty took its name from his grandmother Victoria's beloved consort Prince Albert (grampaw): the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. During that hemorrhagic war that began in 1914, the family connection between George V and the Germany Kaiser came to be perceived as a source of anti-royal feeling in Britain. To address this, it was decided to sever formally the royal link with Germany. There was a brainstorming session at the castle to come up with a new name for the royal house, and finally someone (you could look up who) suggested ``Windsor.'' Everyone immediately recognized the fitness and Englishness of it. Windsor Castle had served as one of England's royal residences since at least the year 1110. Kaiser Wilhelm II (also a grandson of Victoria) had visited Windsor Castle in November 1899; he irritated the Prussian officers accompanying him by pointing to the Round Tower and saying ``Gentlemen, from that tower the World is ruled.'' Three days after Bastille Day, 1917, George V proclaimed that ``all descendants in the male line of Queen Victoria, who are subjects of these realms, other than female descendants who marry or who have married, shall bear the name Windsor.'' He also surrendered some of his hereditary titles. When cousin Willi heard the news, he quipped that he could now go to the theater and see ``The Merry Wives of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.''

You can read a little about ``The Merry Shrews of Venice'' at the KSV entry. (Incidentally, if you're not getting these jokes you can be fairly well assured that you are a philistine.) You can also read some self-indulgent nonsense concerning Windsor, Ontario, at the London entry.

Unless you subscribe to some of the wilder conspiracy theories (and even if you do) the Tsar and his family were murdered in 1918 at Yekaterinburg, the night of Bastille+1. (Still under construction.) (I mean the entry. The entry is still under construction. The Bastille was mobbed and destroyed on July 14, 1789.)

One observation that inclined Thomas Jefferson towards revolution was the realization that the British royal succession was so often interrupted and diverted that revolution, in some form, could be regarded as a method of electing rulers that was sanctioned by hoary, if not holy, tradition. Of course, Conor Cruise O'Brien, better known for other things than introducing the acronym ACROV, would probably argue that Jefferson didn't need much convincing.

International calls to the UK begin with the international access code (you probably knew that) followed by 44.

Welcome to the home page of the UKCPO, the voice of the UK photonics community. This is your starting point to find out about the UK capability in optical techniques and technology-from light curtains to laser cutting via medicine, communications and non-destructive testing.

The UKCPO was founded by Professor Colin Webb of the University of Oxford and Chairman of Oxford Lasers. The consortium is currently led by the President, Professor Julian Jones, and is driven by a board of members drawn from a wide range of industrial and professional organisations.

UKCPO is not a member of the ICOIA (as of 4/2008). SOA, a founding member of UKCPO, is also a founding member of ICOIA.

Back in the 90's, it seemed that the majority of virus alerts were hoaxes. Some achieved the status of legends. The Good Times virus was perhaps the most legendary virus hoax. I haven't seen ``Good Times Virus! It's the real thing this time!'' yet, and by now I guess I never will.

If you receive a virus alert in a personal email message, take a moment to check it against the list of hoaxes compiled by Symantec or by McAfee. Do this before you pass along the warning; good intentions alone are not enough.

The U.M. is a frustrated idealist immobilized by his intellect: able to see not just the imperfections of the world but also the imperfections of reformers, revolutionists and all committed idealists, he is without faith and isolated. Post-heroic. A cynic only in his perceptions, not in his sensibilities.

Something like that, anyway.

Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man lived underground as well.

According to a widely disseminated humor collection, Tyra Banks has remarked that

I don't know what to do with my arms. It just makes me feel weird and I feel like people are looking at me and that makes me nervous.

I guess the humor part is that people are looking at her.

Uma's father is a Buddhist scholar, and Buddhism is practiced in Japan, but I don't know how he came up with the name (vide uma)...

The scientific understanding of taste is still a stew. Taste, strictly construed, excludes the olfactory and mouthfeel (tactile) elements of flavor. Traditionally, taste has been regarded as comprising salt, sour, bitter, and sweet sensations. However, there is not a simple one-to-one relation between different kinds of taste cells and different taste components, and various theories have plausibly posited five, six and more taste components. FWIW, as of 2001 the one added taste that has the greatest support among researchers is umami, excited by MSG, q.v.

They have a thing about leadership. They are ``America's Leadership University,'' and here I'd never even heard of it. I guess I haven't been following that stuff. The sisters' old monastery-and-girls'-high-school complex houses the university's Benedictine Center for Servant Leadership, which sounds like an oxymoron and in principle is not. Sr. Thomas Welder, University President, writes: ``Your future as a leader is our deepest concern. At the University of Mary, we have always measured our success by the success of our graduates.''

The Harold Schafer Leadership center provides model value-based educational experiences for present and future entrepreneurs and leaders.

The inspiration for the Harold Schafer Leadership Center comes directly from the life and career of North Dakota entrepreneur Harold Schafer.

Did you ever see the movie ``Back to School'' (1986), starring the late Rodney Dangerfield (1921-2004)? Harold Shafer has that look. (An unnecessary remake has been penciled in for a 2006 release.)

Oh well, in that case I'll take the Cliff's Notes, the report is due tomorrow.

We mention this school a number of times at the FUCAM entry. FPMs is yet another school in Mons.

The corresponding organization for France, Atelier National de Reproduction des Thèses, stocks microfilms of French theses and (if authorized by the author) sells hard copies of them. Kind of pricey; on something approximating A5 paper; no credit-card orders. Try different searches -- the engine is hit-or-miss.

Toni Braxton had a hit in 1996 with ``Unbreak My Heart.'' The music and lyrics were written by Diane Warren. It was first released as a ``single'' on a two-track CD. The other track was a Spanish version. Stupidly, the title lyric was translated as ``No Rompas Mi Corazón'' (`Don't Break My Heart.') Unstupid people familiar with Spanish know to coin a nonce word corresponding to unbreak, obviously desrompe in Spanish generally (tú conjugation) and desrompé in Argentina, Uruguay, and Central America (vos conjugation).

Also in 1996, David Faxon, a pioneer in angioplasty techniques, was named one of the best doctors in LA by Los Angeles Magazine. A 1997 story on him by Christopher Tedeschi was entitled ``Unbreak My Heart.''

Teresa Hill borrowed the title for a book in 2001.

I don't think the Elton John/Kiki Dee duet ``Don't Go Breaking My Heart'' has been recorded in Spanish by anyone, but the song title is sometimes glossed in Spanish as ``No Vayas Rompiendo Mi Corazón.'' That's ordinary Spanish and fairly accurate. The extended sense of go not referring to movement is paralleled in Spanish by ir and andar (these have somewhat overlapping ranges of meaning that can often be translated `go,' and both can be used in the sense needed here, though ir is more common in this function). The only thing that keeps the translation from being strictly word-for-word is that negative commands are handled differently in the two languages. English uses the auxiliary do and not followed by an infinitive; Spanish uses no (meaning `no' or `not') and a subjunctive (vayas here is a subjunctive form of ir).

The UN and its current Secretary General, Kofi Annan, shared the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize. They were recognized for ``their work for a better organized and more peaceful world.'' They join the ranks of such previous laureates as Yassir Arafat.

The United Nations existed as a concept during WWII, forming a prominent part of how the American government presented what it was doing in the war. See, for example, the quote from Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo under DOOLITTLE. Gertrude Stein spent WWII in Vichy France. Here is her description of how American wartime broadcasts would begin: ``The Americans say with poetry and fire, This is the Voice of America, and then with modesty and good neighborliness, one of the United Nations, it is the voice of America speaking to you across the Atlantic.'' (More context at the VOA entry.)

For those who are getting tired of the monochrome UN standard, there's a new ``Worlds Flag'' (sic). The flag background is like the French tricolor, but the vertical band at the right (red in the French flag) is green in the Worlds Flag. In the center, the flag features a projection of the globe into a circular map. (This is doubtless intended to stand as a symbol of distortion.) Two yellow eagles face off from opposite upper corners, hovering and pooping four stars apiece.

Well, some people say it doesn't look like the French flag at all, but like the Ivory Coast flag, with the left vertical band blue instead of orange. A third group says it's really like the Sierra Leone flag, rotated clockwise 90 degrees and then stretched horizontally. The partisans of these different views are quietly lining up allies.

The Worlds Flag was put forward in 2002 by an organization that ``believe[s] that the first and most important step towards a truly global outlook is the creation of a world flag.'' This is manifestly preposterous, but it's a better premise than that a parliament of delegates from the world's dictatorships will promote world freedom. A point in favor of the Worlds Flag proponents is that, for one reason at least, you can't call them ``silly one-worlders.'' Another point is that unlike the UN, their idea has not yet been tried and found wanting, unless you count the UN flag. In fact, there has been at least one accidental experiment of sorts, and it was a success of sorts.

The first national flag of the Confederate States of America was the stars and bars. It looked much like the thirteen-star flag of the 1776 rebels, except that it had three bars instead of thirteen stripes. (The blue square was the size of two bars.) The arrangement and number of stars in the blue ``union'' field was specified thus: ``In the center of the union a circle of white stars corresponding in number with the States in the Confederacy.'' (The Confederacy soon counted 13 states: the 11 that officially seceded, plus two states with secessionist legislatures that had fled or formed outside their state capitals. In practice, the number of stars varied from 1 to an optimistic 17, and the patterns varied also.) From a distance, this flag was too easy to confuse with the Union flag. This confusion probably led to some hesitancy, and perhaps caused fewer shots to be fired. Soon enough, the Confederacy adopted a ``battle flag'' that bore a closer resemblance to the British flag. (Good thinking: the distinguishability of that flag from the stars and stripes had been battle-tested.) The battle flag replaced the blue-field-with-stars in subsequent national flags of the Confederacy. Based on the American experience, it is clear that the Worlds Flag will be especially effective in promoting peace when all nations are required to use it and no other. That will happen on the same day the UN becomes effective.

``The idea for The Worlds Flag is a determinative step on the road to universal peace - a single emblem to unite people everywhere.''

On the subject of unrealistic schemes for world peace, it may be remembered that one of the putative advantages of an artificial world language (such as Esperanto, though the claim has been made for others) is that it would lead to worldwide understanding and reduce war. It would be hard argue that this hypothetical pacific effect is an absolute one, or a few wars would be hard to explain. Just off the top of my head, that would include the Peloponnesian War, the wars among Alexander's generals for control of his empire (after his death), the war between Prussia and Austria-Hungary, virtually all Latin American wars, many wars for independence, and most civil wars. Someone will say, ``at least they were civil.'' They weren't.