Thursday, December 31, 2015

Gleichschaltung

Gleichschaltung, meaning "coordination", "making the same", "bringing into line"), is a Nazi term for the process by which the Nazi regime successively established a system of totalitarian control and coordination over all aspects of society. The historian Richard J. Evans translated the term as "forcible-coordination" in his most recent work on Nazi Germany.

Among the goals of this policy were to bring about adherence to a specific doctrine and way of thinking and to control as many aspects of life as possible.
The apex of the Nazification of Germany was in the resolutions approved during the Nuremberg Rally of 1935, when the symbols of the Party and the State were fused (see Flag of Germany) and the Germans of Jewish religion and descent were deprived of citizenship, paving the way to the Holocaust.

Tuesday, December 29, 2015

deracinate

deracinate (third-person singular simple present deracinates, present participle deracinating, simple past and past participle deracinated)
  1. To pull up by the roots; to uproot; to extirpate.
  2. To force people from their homeland to a new or foreign location.
  3. To liberate or be liberated from a culture or its norms.

Monday, December 28, 2015

subaqueous

sub·a·que·ous
səbˈākwēəs,-ˈak-/
adjective
adjective: subaqueous; adjective: sub-aqueous
1.
existing, formed, or taking place underwater.

Saturday, December 26, 2015

egregious

egregious (comparative more egregious, superlative most egregious)
  1. Exceptional, conspicuous, outstanding, most usually in a negative fashion.
    The student has made egregious errors on the examination.
  2. Outrageously bad.

Friday, December 25, 2015

Quietism

Quietism in philosophy is an approach to the subject that sees the role of philosophy as broadly therapeutic or remedial. Quietist philosophers believe that philosophy has no positive thesis to contribute, but rather that its value is in defusing confusions in the linguistic and conceptual frameworks of other subjects, including non-quietist philosophy. By re-formulating supposed problems in a way that makes the misguided reasoning from which they arise apparent, the quietist hopes to put an end to man's confusion, and help return to a state of intellectual quietude.

Thursday, December 24, 2015

Acid test

Acid test (gold), a chemical or metallurgical test which uses acid, now also used as a general term for "verified", "approved", or "tested" in a large number of fields.

Wednesday, December 23, 2015

capitonym

A capitonym is a word that changes its meaning (and sometimes pronunciation) when it is capitalized; the capitalization usually applies due to one form being a proper noun or eponym. It is a portmanteau of the word capital with the suffix -onym. A capitonym is a form of homograph and – when the two forms are pronounced differently – also of heteronym. In situations where both words should be capitalized (such as the beginning of a sentence), there will be nothing to distinguish between them except the context in which they are used.

Although some pairs, such as march and March, are completely unrelated, in other cases, such as august and catholic, the capitalized form is a name that is etymologically related to the uncapitalized form. For example, August derives from the name of Imperator Augustus, who named himself after the word augustus, whence English august came. Likewise, both Catholic and catholic derive from a Greek adjective meaning "universal".

Capital letters may be used to differentiate between a set of objects, and a particular example of that object. For instance in Astronomical terminology a distinction may be drawn between a moon, any natural satellite, and the Moon, to be specific the natural satellite of Earth. Likewise, Sun with a capital may be used to emphasise that the sun of Earth is under discussion.

Tuesday, December 22, 2015

squiggle

squiggle (plural squiggles)
  1. a short twisting or wiggling line or mark 
  2. (informal) the tilde
  3. an illegible scrawl

hyponym

In linguistics, a hyponym is a word or phrase whose semantic field is included within that of another word, its hypernym (sometimes spelled hyperonym outside of the natural language processing community). In simpler terms, a hyponym shares a type-of relationship with its hypernym. For example, scarlet, vermilion, carmine, and crimson are all hyponyms of red (their hypernym), which is, in turn, a hyponym of colour.
Computer science often terms this relationship an "is-a" relationship. For example, the phrase Red is-a colour can be used to describe the hyponymic relationship between red and colour.

Monday, December 21, 2015

Sunday, December 20, 2015

aptronym

An aptronym (also: aptonym) or charactonym is a name aptly suited to its owner. The medieval Latin poem Eupolemius uses aptronyms based on Greek words to allegorise the story of the Gospel. In the book What's in a Name? (1996), author Paul Dickson cites a long list of aptronyms originally compiled by Professor Lewis P. Lipsitt, of Brown University. Psychologist Carl Jung wrote in his 1952 book, Synchronicity, that there was a "sometimes quite grotesque coincidence between a man's name and his peculiarities". Fictional examples of aptronyms include Mr. Talkative and Mr. Worldly Wiseman in John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress (1678), Truman Burbank (true-man), the lead character in the 1998 film The Truman Show, the principal cast of the Mr. Men (1971), and all the characters in Marc Blitzstein's 1937 play The Cradle Will Rock.

Saturday, December 19, 2015

podzols

In soil science, podzols (known as Spodosols in China and the United States of America, Espodossolos in Brazil, and Podosols in Australia) are the typical soils of coniferous, or boreal forests. They are also the typical soils of eucalypt forests and heathlands in southern Australia, while in Western Europe podzols develop on heathland, which is often a construct of human interference through grazing and burning. Many podzols in this region may have developed over the past 3000 years in response to vegetation and climatic changes. In some British moorlands with podzolic soils there are brown earths preserved under Bronze Age barrows. “Podzol” is Russian for "under ash" (под/pod=under, зола/zola=ash) and likely refers to the common experience of Russian peasants of plowing up an apparent under-layer of ash (leached or E horizon) during first plowing of a virgin soil of this type.

Thursday, December 17, 2015

Tteokbokki

Tteokbokki, also known as ddeokbokki, topokki (in Japan) or dukboki, is a popular Korean snack food which is commonly purchased from street vendors or pojangmacha. Originally it was called tteok jjim (떡찜), and was a braised dish of sliced rice cake, meat, eggs, and seasoning.
File:Korean.snacks-Tteokbokki-08.jpg

Wednesday, December 16, 2015

barchan

A barchan or barkhan dune is an arc-shaped sand ridge, comprising well-sorted sand. This type of dune possesses two "horns" that face downwind, with the slip face (the downwind slope) at the angle of repose of sand, approximately 30–35 degrees for medium-fine dry sand. The upwind side is packed by the wind, and stands at about 15 degrees. Simple barchan dunes may stretch from meters to a hundred meters or so between the tips of the horns. The word is of Turkic origin, borrowed into English via Russian.

File:Barchan.jpg

Simple barchan dunes may appear as larger, compound barchan or megabarchan dunes, which may migrate with the wind. Barchans and megabarchans may coalesce into ridges that extend for hundreds of kilometers. Dune collisions and changes in wind direction that spawn new barchans from the horns of the old govern the size distribution in a given field.

Tuesday, December 15, 2015

hypercane



A hypercane is a hypothetical class of extreme hurricane that could form if ocean temperatures reached around 50 °C (122 °F), which is 15 °C (27 °F) warmer than the warmest ocean temperature ever recorded. Such an increase could be caused by a large asteroid or comet impact, a large supervolcanic eruption, or extensive global warming. There is some speculation that a series of hypercanes resulting from an impact by a large asteroid or comet contributed to the demise of the dinosaurs. The hypothesis was created by Kerry Emanuel of MIT who also coined the term.

Monday, December 14, 2015

isothermal process

An isothermal process is a change of a system, in which the temperature remains constant: ΔT = 0. This typically occurs when a system is in contact with an outside thermal reservoir (heat bath), and the change occurs slowly enough to allow the system to continually adjust to the temperature of the reservoir through heat exchange. In contrast, an adiabatic process is where a system exchanges no heat with its surroundings (Q = 0). In other words, in an isothermal process, the value ΔT = 0 but Q ≠ 0, while in an adiabatic process, ΔT ≠ 0 but Q = 0.

Sunday, December 13, 2015

ghoul

A ghoul is a (folkloric) monster associated with graveyards and consuming human flesh, often classified as undead. The oldest surviving literature that mention ghouls is likely One Thousand and One Nights. The term was first used in English literature in 1786, in William Beckford's Orientalist novel Vathek, which describes the ghūl of Arabian folklore.
File:Amine Discovered with the Goule.jpg
By extension, the word ghoul is also used in a derogatory sense to refer to a person who delights in the macabre, or whose profession is linked directly to death, such as a gravedigger.

Saturday, December 12, 2015

Night soil

Night soil is a euphemism for human excrement collected at night from cesspools, privies, etc. and sometimes used as a fertilizer. Night soil is produced as a result of a waste management system in areas without community infrastructure such as a sewage treatment facility, or individual septic disposal. In this system of waste management, the human faeces are collected in solid form.

Friday, December 11, 2015

Accipiter

The genus Accipiter is a group of birds of prey in the family Accipitridae, many of which are named as goshawks and sparrowhawks. They can be anatomically distinguished from their relatives by the lack of a procoracoid foramen. Two small and aberrant species usually placed here do possess a large procoracoid foramen and are also distinct as regards DNA sequence. They may warrant separation in the old genus Hieraspiza.
File:Collared Sparrowhawk kobble08.JPG
Extant Accipiters range in size from the Little Sparrowhawk (A. minullus), in which the smallest males measure 20 cm (7.9 in) long, span 39 cm (15 in) across the wings and weigh 68 g (2.4 oz), to the Northern Goshawk (A. gentilis), in which the largest females measure 64 cm (25 in) long, span 127 cm (50 in) across the wings and weigh 2,200 g (4.9 lb). These birds are slender with short broad rounded wings and a long tail which helps them manoeuvre in flight. They have long legs and long sharp talons used to kill their prey, and a sharp hooked bill used in feeding. Females tend to be larger than males. They often ambush their prey, mainly small birds and mammals, capturing it after a short chase. The typical flight pattern is a series of flaps followed by a short glide. They are commonly found in wooded or shrubby areas.

Thursday, December 10, 2015

baryogenesis

In physical cosmology, baryogenesis is the generic term for hypothetical physical processes that produced an asymmetry between baryons and antibaryons in the very early universe, resulting in the substantial amounts of residual matter that make up the universe today.

Baryogenesis theories (the most important being electroweak baryogenesis and GUT baryogenesis) employ sub-disciplines of physics such as quantum field theory, and statistical physics, to describe such possible mechanisms. The fundamental difference between baryogenesis theories is the description of the interactions between fundamental particles.

The next step after baryogenesis is the much better understood Big Bang nucleosynthesis, during which light atomic nuclei began to form.

Wednesday, December 9, 2015

space roar

The space roar is a radio signal from outer space. Discovered by NASA's Alan Kogut and his team, the announcement was made at the 213th meeting of the American Astronomical Society on January 7, 2009. Described as a loud hiss, the team discovered the signal while trying to find traces of heat from first generation stars using an ARCADE radiometer. This instrument is designed to detect radiation at centimeter wavelengths. Though signals from radio galaxies have been detected before, the "space roar" sounds six times louder than what is predicted from those sources. Scientists have yet to explain its source. NASA scientists have currently ruled out primordial stars and all other known radio sources. The roar currently limits the study of the universe's earliest stars. In 2011, the ARCADE 2 researchers reported, "Correcting for instrumental systematic errors in measurements such as ARCADE 2 is always a primary concern. We emphasize that we detect residual emission at 3 GHz with the ARCADE 2 data, but the result is also independently detected by a combination of low-frequency data and FIRAS."

Tuesday, December 8, 2015

dux

dux

In schools in Scotland, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Iceland, dux is a modern title given to the top student in academic and sporting achievement (Dux Litterarum and Dux Ludorum respectively) in each graduating year. In this usage, Dux is similar to the American concept of a valedictorian. The runner-up may be given the title proxime accessit (meaning "he came next") or semidux.

Monday, December 7, 2015

pinion

A pinion is a round gear used in several applications:
File:Rack and pinion animation.gif

Friday, December 4, 2015

Neuroptera

File:Chrysopidae 3035.jpg
The insect order Neuroptera, or net-winged insects, includes the lacewings, mantidflies, antlions, and their relatives. The order contains some 6,010 species. The group was once known as Planipennia, and at that time also included alderflies, fishflies, dobsonflies and snakeflies, but these are now generally considered to be separate orders (the Megaloptera and Raphidioptera). Sometimes the name Neuropterida is used to refer to these three orders as a group. This is either placed at superorder rank, with the Endopterygota becoming an unranked clade above it, or the Endopterygota are maintained as a superorder, with an unranked Neuropterida being a part of them. Within the endopterygotes, the closest living relatives of the neuropteridan clade are the beetles. The common name lacewings is often used for the most widely known net-winged insects - the green lacewings (Chrysopidae) - but actually most members of the Neuroptera are referred to as some sort of "lacewing".

Thursday, December 3, 2015

Tramontane

Tramontane is a classical name for a northern wind. The exact form of the name and precise direction varies from country to country. The word came to English from Italian tramontana, which developed from Latin trānsmontānus (trāns- + montānus), "beyond the mountains/across the mountains", referring to the Alps in the North of Italy. The word has other non-wind-related senses: it can refer to anything that comes from, or anyone who lives on, the other side of mountains, or even more generally, anything seen as foreign, strange, or even barbarous.

Wednesday, December 2, 2015

Dowlas

Dowlas is the name given to a plain cloth, similar to sheeting, but usually coarser.
It is made in several qualities, from line warp and weft to two warp and weft, and is used chiefly for aprons, pocketing, soldiers' gaiters, linings and overalls. The finer makes are sometimes made into shirts for workmen, and occasionally used for heavy pillow-cases.

Tuesday, December 1, 2015

lordosis

  Lordosis is historically defined as an abnormal inward curvature of the lumbar spine.