Word of the Day!

[hcjilson]

When I was young, my grandfather helped me to increase my vocabulary by getting me in the habit of learning a new word every day.I did it regularly until I hit high school when I had come to the mistaken conclusion that I knew it all.I also used to do cross word puzzles a lot. As I grew older I got out of the good habits and into some bad one's-enough said! I noticed a woman in the office the other day, doing a crossword while waiting for the doctor. I asked her how she was doing (she was doing it with a pen!). She was hard of hearing and thought I had asked her WHAT she was doing.

"Excersizing my mind" she said. She then told me that as she grew older she needed to excersize her mind to keep sharp, and she said it helped her not to forget things. I told her I no longer did crosswords because I couldn't remember the "catch" words anymore. She advised me to get back into it because "the worst thing that could happen" is that I would learn new words.

That exchange gave me the idea for this thread.I'm not sure how, or if it will develop, but here goes!

[rbaker]

Harry,

Here is another good site:

http://wordsmith.org/

I started using this site back when it was a bulletin board (1985 ? ? ?)

[hcjilson]

The worse that can happen is we'll learn a bunch of new words every day- Many thanks for the assistance. hj

PS Feel free to add your own words whenever you can. They stay up for a day and then go in the "past words" post.

[PAkev]

Great Concept.........


I had an instructor in college that did something similar. He often found unpopular words in the index of our textbook and offered extra credit on exams if we were able to define the word. I learned a lot of new words from this class which had improved my colloquial vocabulary and boosted my GPA.

By the way this is the same instructor that coined a phrase I love:
"Once you THINK you know EVERYTHING.......You STOP knowing ANYTHING !

Kevin

[1968]

Eschatology was on the mind of the panjandrum, a reputed cormorant, when his egregious malversation was revealed as contretemps in front of those attending the tattoo in his honor this afternoon.

[hcjilson]

I've purposely left off the definitions so you could look them up. Use any dictionary you can find online to get the definitions. You will definitely be surprised at some of them.

panjandrum- tattoo- cormorant- eschatology-egregious-contretemps- malversation-exhort- genuflect- solecism-extemporaneous- forgo- aborning- dulcet- hoi polloi-scurrilous- recherche-permeate-germane-disconsolate-Ratiocination-Ineluctable-exegesis-cornucopia

[harry a saake]

MR. JILSON, do you perhaps have a particular or perculiar propensity for this plethora of words, or might it be a proclivity?

[Shutterbug]

This thread reminds me of a friend of mine who told me he was learning a new word every day and practicing it on his wife.

He got bogged down with the word "sensuous". He thought and thought about how he could use it in a sentence without sounding unmanly. His opportunity finally came when his wife excused herself from TV viewing to get a drink. He said "Hey honey, sensuous up, how about bringing me a beer?"

[rinselberg]

ADJECTIVE: Of or relating to the sense of touch; tactile.

ETYMOLOGY: Greek haptikos or haptesthai - to grasp or touch.

USAGE: ImmersiveTouch™ is the next generation of augmented virtual reality technology, being the first system that integrates a haptic device, with a head and hand tracking system, and a high-resolution and high-pixel-density stereoscopic display.



Its ergonomic design provides a comfortable working volume in the space of a standard desktop. The haptic device is collocated with the 3D graphics, giving the user a more realistic and natural means to manipulate and modify 3D data in real time. The high-performance, multi-sensorial computer interface allows easy development of medical, dental, engineering or scientific virtual reality simulation and training applications that appeal to many stimuli: audio, visual, tactile and kinesthetic.



A half-silvered mirror is used to recreate an augmented VRE (Virtual Reality Environment) that integrates the user’s hands and the virtual 3D models in a common working volume. Since the user’s hands are behind the translucent mirror, they don’t occlude the virtual image, preserving the stereo illusion, and allowing the user to see his/her hands while interacting with the virtual objects.


Dictionary reference: The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by the Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

Tech credits:
http://www.evl.uic.edu/core.php?mod=4&type=3&indi=270
http://www.immersivetouch.com/specifications.php

Poster art, courtesy of Linotype.com: Umbra™ Medium.


The UAE (United Arab Emirates) was the country at the center of the recent US port terminals controversy. Why are they known as America's "Top Gun" in the Middle East? RinselNews™ has the answers ...

[rinselberg]

prejudice



SYLLABICATION: prej·u·dice

NOUN: 1a. An adverse judgment or opinion formed beforehand or without knowledge or examination of the facts. b. A preconceived preference or idea. 2. The act or state of holding unreasonable preconceived judgments or convictions. See synonyms at predilection. 3. Irrational suspicion or hatred of a particular group, race, or religion. 4. Detriment or injury caused to a person by the preconceived, unfavorable conviction of another or others.

TRANSITIVE VERB: Inflected forms: prej·u·diced, prej·u·dic·ing, prej·u·dic·es
1. To cause (someone) to judge prematurely and irrationally. See synonyms at bias. 2. To affect injuriously or detrimentally by a judgment or an act.

ETYMOLOGY: Middle English, from Old French, from Latin praeidicium : prae-, pre- + idicium, judgment (from idex, idic-), judge.

rinselberg on USAGE:

It's not the common usages of the word that interest me, but its more colorful appearance in the fictional and movie tagline "terminate with extreme prejudice ... ".

The Wikipedia traces that phrase all the way back to 1973, in the novel Don't Embarrass The Bureau by Bernard Connors, where it was used as an idiom for "assassinate".

Quoting from Wikipedia :

[Subsequently], the term has been used [again] in the same context, particularly in the 1979 [Coppola screen epic] "Apocalypse Now", in which Martin Sheen's character [Willard] is ordered to terminate the insane Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando) with "extreme prejudice."

The extraction extreme prejudice is popularly thought to have originated in military circles, [meaning] a "take no prisoners" or "show no mercy" attitude by military forces. However, The U.S. military denies using the term or supporting any [such] actions as depicted in any of the literature. Extreme prejudice has since become a jocular term meaning to take any action to extremes, such as to "borrow with extreme prejudice" - meaning to steal.

Reporting on the singular event of the past week from Iraq, MSNBC used a shortened form of the idiom with this:



That photo was replaced with a larger and more gruesome one of the dead Zarqawi, under the column heading "TERMINATED".

The New York Post issued this ...



... which drew the ire of one blogger on CBS News.

For literary pretense, however, if not for sheer obscurity, it would be hard to top media giant rinselberg™, which remarked on the Zarqawi killing by recycling one of the taglines from Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 Vietnam-themed screen blockbuster Apocalypse Now :


This unnamed CIA officer commented on the joint US/Iraqi attack on the safe house where terrorist mastermind Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed. CLICK ON THE PHOTO FOR AUDIO CONTENT.

The actor in the photo is Jerry Ziesmer, who only had a cameo acting role in the film: That one memorable phrase might have been his only line. (He was actually the First Assistant Director.)

More sound bites from Apocalyspe Now can be heard online at http://www.phattie.net/apocalypse.htm.

Dictionary reference: The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by the Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.


Only you can prevent CPU fires

[rinselberg]

Just in time for Major League Baseball's All-Star Game ...

Sabermetrics is the analysis of baseball through objective evidence, especially baseball statistics. The term is derived from the acronym SABR, which stands for the Society for American Baseball Research. It was coined by Bill James, who has been its most enthusiastic (and by far its most famous) proponent.

From David Grabiner's Sabermetric Manifesto:

Bill James defined sabermetrics as "the search for objective knowledge about baseball." Thus, sabermetrics attempts to answer objective questions about baseball, such as "which player on the Red Sox contributed the most to the team's offense?" or "How many home runs will Ken Griffey, Jr. hit next year?" It cannot deal with the subjective judgments which are also important to the game, such as "Who is your favorite player?" or "That was a great game."

Sabermetricians call into question traditional measures of baseball skill. For instance, batting average is considered to be a statistic of limited usefulness because it turns out to be a poor predictor of a team's ability to score runs. Typical sabermetric reasoning would say that runs win ballgames, and so a good measure of a player's worth is his ability to help his team score more runs than the opposing team. Accordingly, sabermetric measures - such as Bill James's Runs Created and Win Shares or Pete Palmer's Total Player Rating - are usually phrased in terms of either runs or team wins; a player might be described as being worth 54 runs more than an average player at the same position over the course of a full season, for example.

Sabermetrics is concerned both with determining the value of a player in a season gone by, and with trying to predict the value of a player in the future based on his past performances. These are not the same thing. For example, a player with a high batting average one year may have been very valuable to his team, but batting average is known to be a volatile stat and relying on it to remain high in future years is often not a good principle. A sabermetrician might argue that a high walk rate is a better indication that a player will retain his value in the future.

While this area of study is still in development, it has yielded many interesting insights into the game of baseball, and in the area of performance measurement generally.

Some sabermetric measurements have entered mainstream baseball usage, especially OPS (on-base plus slugging) and, to a lesser extent, WHIP (walks plus hits per inning pitched). (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabermetrics.)

Bill James, the "dean" of the sabermetricians, used the methodology to select his greatest ever starting nine: The best nine-man starting roster that a manager could ever hope to field, if he could select players from any time in baseball history, going back to day one. Some of his selections would probably be surprising to many modern fans of the game. (See "Bill James All-Stars" at http://science.discovery.com/converg.../baseball.html.)

Tufts University, in Boston, even offers sabermetrics in the form of a university extension course, called "Sabermetrics 101".



What keeps some Tufts students up late at night - a graphic from "Sabermetrics 101".

The Tufts syllabus includes some impressively titled statistical analyses, such as "The Green Monster Effect: A Run Saved or a Run Earned?" - a reference to the unique and famous left field wall at Boston's Fenway Park - and "Weather Impact on Pitchers", "Phenotypes of Superscrubs" and "The Effect of Moneyball on Inefficiencies in the Free Agent Market". (Source: http://sabermetrics.hnrc.tufts.edu/.)

Sabermetrics raises many questions about traditional baseball strategies.

Does the exact ordering of the hitters in a batting lineup matter very much? Is it ever logical to try to steal a base? Is it ever advantageous for the batter to try to move a runner on first base over to second with a sacrifice bunt? The advent of the "closer" - the relief specialist who comes in from the bullpen to pitch the last inning of a game when his team is ahead, but only by a few runs, so that the game is still in doubt: Does that make any sense, statistically?

Some of the particular innovations of sabermetrics are in the domains of "park effects", which considers the differences in play between ballparks, and fielding stats, which historically have not been compiled as systematically as pitching, batting and base-stealing stats.

Before the advent of sabermetrics, there was Stephen Jay Gould.

Dr. Gould, who died somewhat prematurely and not all that long ago, was a giant in the field of paleontology: An internationally celebrated author and long-time Harvard professor and scientist who contributed as much or more to the modern or Neo-Darwinist theory of evolution as any other scholar - by anyone's standards, as much a part of Neo-Darwinism's "starting nine" as Charles Darwin himself.

Gould was also an avid baseball fan and wrote at some length on the application of modern methods of statistical analysis to the game of Major League Baseball.




See why computing with those tedious, old-fashioned bits (binary digits) is becoming so 20th century . . . http://www.optiboard.com/forums/showthread.php?t=17515

[rinselberg]

yroball





Video: Daisuke Matsuzaka throws a gyroball

MSNBC video clip "Dice-K"



The gyroball is the name given to a breaking pitch [purportedly] used by baseball players in Japan.

The pitch was developed by two Japanese researchers ... who used computer simulations to create a new style of delivery intended to reduce stress on the pitcher's body. At the point of release, instead of having the pitcher's arm move inwards towards the body (the usual method in the United States), the pitcher rotates his arm so that it moves away from his body, towards third base [in the case of a right-handed pitcher]. This [innovative motion] creates a bullet-like spin on the ball, like a perfectly thrown football. When thrown by a right-hander, the pitch moves sharply down and away or "outside" from right-handed batters and "inside" or in towards left-handed batters.

In baseball, most pitches are thrown either with backspin, like a fastball, or with a forward spinning motion or topspin, like a curveball or slider. Batters use the [pitcher's arm speed and whatever they can see of the spin on an incoming baseball], highlighted by the stitching of its seams, to judge the speed of a pitch. The gyroball is thrown with the same arm speed as a fastball but [actually travels] much slower. Since it has that bullet-like spinning motion, which is neither backspin or topspin, on occasion (perhaps when the seams are hidden from the view of the batter) it is said to [deceive even] the most capable batters [into swinging] either wildly ahead of or behind the baseball.

The gyroball has been simulated in Baseball Mogul 2007, a computer game. In Baseball Mogul 2007, the trajectory of the ball looks [like] a fastball or changeup, with a late lateral break away from right-handed batters (when thrown by right-handed pitchers) ...

The gyroball is often confused with a completely different Japanese pitch called the shuuto, due to an error in a well-known article [under the title of The Ghost Pitch] by baseball writer Will Carroll ... Although Carroll later corrected himself, this confusion still persists.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


Was all of that clear enough? Maybe not. Try this:

A gyroball is a breaking pitch thrown at about the same speed as a two-seam fastball (faster than a slider, but slower than a four-seam fastball). The pitch starts out looking like a straight change or hanging curve before making a sharp break directly away from the batter (when thrown by a right-handed pitcher to a right-handed batter).

Some scouts have used the term "pure slider" to refer to the gyroball because the late lateral break contains little or no vertical movement. The movement is somewhat similar to a slider (away from right-handed batters). But because players are [generally] unfamiliar with this pitch, it has so far proven harder to hit than a typical slider. Without the horizontal break typical of a slider, perhaps a comparison to Mariano Rivera's cut fastball is more appropriate.

Although American coaches tend to agree that there is a continuum from 'fastball' to 'cut fastball' to 'slider' (and then on to 'slurve' and 'curve'), there is no consensus as to whether the gyroball has a place on this continuum. Unlike the linear mechanics practiced by American pitchers (building momentum from the legs up through the torso and into the pitching arm and hand), the gyroball is delivered with a circular motion that puts the pitching hand "inside" the ball upon release. Although hard to describe, many scouts agree that the gyroball constitutes a new method of delivering the ball. At this point it's difficult to [predict whether] this [little known] pitch and its [innovative] mechanics will grow in popularity, or fall out of favor due to excessive arm strain or some other weakness.

Sports Mogul Inc. - Glossary of Pitches


As of this writing, the only professional pitcher credited with throwing the gyroball is Daisuke Matsuzaka of Japan's Seibu Lions. Matsuzaka throws his fastball in the low nineties. According to reports, his gyroball is thrown only a couple of miles per hour slower. Odds are good that Daisuke Matsuzaka, Japan's reputed gyroball specialist, will be playing here (in the United States) for one of the Major League Baseball teams in 2007.


Long before there was baseball, Isaac Newton wrote a text in 1671 on the curved trajectory that is imparted to a baseball (i.e., a baseball-like object or baseball precursor) when thrown with a spin.



In 1852, the German physicist Gustav Magnus elaborated on Newton's groundwork, performing experiments that led to the term "Magnus Effect" - an artifice used by baseball players around the world - and with the increasing emergence of college educated athletes on Major League Baseball rosters, it may be that many of them would be thinking to themselves "ah, the Magnus Effect" - if they were able to silently analyze their every pitch or throw of the ball.

Credit: Boundary Layers and Life in Velocity Gradients


Stills, graphics support and video clip:
http://www.rotoauthority.com/2005/08...ep_2006_f.html
http://www.logolalia.com/abcdefghijk...es/002239.html
http://www.juventudrebelde.cu/seccio...html/japon.htm
http://seti.alien.de/index_german.htm
http://www.gifworks.com/index.php
http://www.imageshack.us/


More than just a search for little green men

[rinselberg]

vicariance



"Vicariance" is a noun. It's a term used by biologists and paleontolgists and is defined as: The separation or division of a group of organisms by a geographic barrier, such as a mountain or a body of water, resulting in differentiation of the original group into new varieties or species.

Usage:

During the Jurassic period (200 to 150 million years ago), the great supercontinent of Pangaea, driven by plate tectonics, began to fragment and separate along plate boundaries, creating distinct land masses that drifted further and further apart until they formed the configuration of continents and oceans that we know today.


The supercontinent of Pangaea

At the start of the Jurassic, an extreme monsoon climate prevailed across most of Pangaea, characterized by hot, desert conditions almost year round. The only seasonal change was an annual but brief deluge of rain in incredible proportions that has been called a "mega monsoon". Dinosuars, at the beginning of their evolution, were constrained by the harsh climate, and were restricted to a relatively small number of species, generally small, and not very different from one species to another.

As the supercontinent continued to break apart and become divided by seas, resulting in more coastal areas, marine air currents sweeping inland brought about a change to a milder climate: Warm and wet all year round over much of the land. Plant life became superabundant. Plant eating dinosaurs evolved into much larger forms, and the evolution of carnivorous dinosaurs, driven by both opportunity and need, followed suit with a trend towards giantism in speciation.

As the continents continued to drift further apart and new mountain ranges appeared, dinosaur populations became divided and quarantined by a growing number of impassable barriers. Migration routes were curtailed or eliminated altogether by the new geography. This resulted in one of the greatest episodes of vicariance in the history of life.

The coupling of these two evolutionary trends - of giantism, together with vicariance - gave rise to an evolutionary explosion of dinosaur speciation during the middle and late Jurassic period, which is when the iconic dinosaurs and flying reptiles familiar to our popular culture began to emerge.









The middle and late Jurassic. From top to bottom: Stegosaurus, Apatosaurus, Allosaurus and Pterodactylus. Click on the images to enlarge.


The computer generated image of Pangaea was created by Paul E. Olsen, Storke Memorial Professor of Geological Sciences at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University since 1984. The image was lifted from the website of Auburn University. The dinosaur art is from critters.pixel-shack.com. The science is courtesy of the "Jurassic" segment from The Science Channel. Image hosting courtesy of ImageShack. Dictionary reference: The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by the Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

[RGC_man]

The gyroball is the name given to a breaking pitch [purportedly] used by baseball players in Japan.

Pah, that's for cissies. Try being on the receiving end of one of these as they bounce up towards your head from the ground a couple of yards away.
http://www.channel4.com/sport/cricket/analyst/bowling/