GRE Words ₁

A dynasty is a sequence of rulers considered members of the same family. Historians traditionally consider many sovereign states' history within a framework of successive dynasties, e.g., China, Ancient Egypt and the Persian Empire. Much of European political history is dominated by dynasties such as the Carolingians, the Capetians, the Bourbons, the Habsburgs, the Stuarts, the Hohenzollerns and the Romanovs. Until the 19th century, it was taken for granted that a legitimate function of a monarch was to aggrandize his dynasty; that is, to increase the territory, wealth and power of family members.

A dynasty is also often called a house (e.g., House of Saud and House of Windsor), and may be described as imperial, royal, ducal or comital depending upon the chief title borne by its rulers. Dynasty is also used to refer to the era during which a family reigned, as well as events, trends and artifacts of that period (e.g. “Ming dynasty vase”). In such cases, often “dynasty” is dropped, while the name is used adjectively; e.g., Tudor style, Ottoman expansion, Romanov decadence, etc

“A sentimentalist”, Oscar Wilde wrote Alfred Douglas, “is one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it.” James Baldwin considered that “Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel… the mask of cruelty”.

Modern man has had great impact on the zebra population. Zebras were, and still are, hunted for their skins, and for meat. They also compete with livestock for forage, and sometimes culled.

Confused and torn over his loyalty to both Palpatine and the Jedi, Anakin informs Jedi Master Mace Windu (Samuel L. Jackson) that Palpatine is the Sith Lord Darth Sidious. Windu and three other Jedi Masters go to arrest Palpatine, but the Chancellor surprises them with a lightsaber and quickly dispatches all but Windu. In the ensuing duel, Windu disarms his opponent. Palpatine unleashes Force lightning at Windu, who deflects it back with his lightsaber at Palpatine, deforming Palpatine's face into the wizened, yellow-eyed visage seen in the original films. Anakin appears and intercedes on Palpatine's behalf and cuts off Windu's hand, allowing Palpatine to shoot Windu with another blast of lightning, hurtling him through the window to his death. Palpatine then accepts Anakin as his new apprentice, Darth Vader.

In 2006 Perry stated that he believes in the inerrancy of the Bible and that those who don't accept Jesus as their savior will go to hell and clarified that belief by saying. “I don't know that there's any human being that has the ability to interpret what God and his final decision-making is going to be,” Mr. Perry said. “That's what the faith says. I understand, and my caveat there is that an all-knowing God certainly transcends my personal ability to make that judgment black and white.” In May 2011, at a meeting in East Texas with business leaders, Perry stated that at age 27, he felt “called to the ministry”.

She was more than South Korea's Julia Roberts or Angelina Jolie. For nearly 20 years, Choi Jin Sil was the country's cinematic sweetheart and as close to being a “national” actress as possible. But since her body was found on Oct. 2, an apparent suicide, she has become a symbol of the difficulties women face in this deeply conservative yet technologically savvy society. Incessant online gossip appears to have been largely to blame for her death. But it's also clear that public life as a single, working, divorced mom — still a pariah status in South Korea — was one role she had a lot of trouble with.

However, Hedges' latest attack is so vicious and gratuitous that some reply seemed necessary. To minimize the amount of time I would need to spend today cleaning this man's vomit, I decided to adapt a few pieces I had already written. But then I just got angry…

…

After my first book was published, the journalist Chris Hedges seemed to make a career out of misrepresenting its contents — asserting, among other calumnies, that somewhere in its pages I call for an immediate, nuclear first strike on the entire Muslim world. Hedges spread this lie so sedulously that I could have spent years writing letters to the editor. Even if I had been willing to squander my time in this way, such letters are generally pointless, as few people read them. In the end, I decided to create a page on my website addressing such controversies, so that I can then forget all about them. The result has been less than satisfying. Several years have passed, and I still meet people at public talks and in comment threads who believe that I support the outright murder of hundreds of millions of innocent people.

In an apparent attempt to become the most tedious person on Earth, Hedges has attacked me again on this point, and the editors at Truthdig have invited me to respond. I suppose it is worth a try. To begin, I'd like to simply cite the text that has been on my website for years, so that readers can appreciate just how unscrupulous and incorrigible Hedges is:

Yes, I know — everyone's been rushing to proclaim Silverlight dead for more than a year now. In fact, I'm frequently cited as the source of that prognostication, in spite of the fact that all I've actually reported is that Microsoft's strategy with Silverlight shifted and that Silverlight is no longer Microsoft's cross-platform runtime solution. Instead, Microsoft currently positions Silverlight as a tool for creating rich media, line-of-business and smartphone apps.

Historians such as Herbert Bix, Akira Fujiwara, Peter Wetzler, and Akira Yamada assert that the post-war view focusing on imperial conferences misses the importance of numerous “behind the chrysanthemum curtain” meetings where the real decisions were made between the Emperor, his chiefs of staff, and the cabinet. Historians such as Fujiwara and Wetzler, based on the primary sources and the monumental work of Shirō Hara, have produced evidence suggesting that the Emperor worked through intermediaries to exercise a great deal of control over the military and was neither bellicose nor a pacifist, but an opportunist who governed in a pluralistic decision-making process. American historian Herbert Bix argues that Emperor Shōwa might have been the prime mover of most of the events of the two wars.

The view promoted by both the Japanese Imperial Palace and the American occupation forces immediately after World War II had Emperor Shōwa as a powerless figurehead behaving strictly according to protocol, while remaining at a distance from the decision-making processes. This view was endorsed by Prime Minister Noboru Takeshita in a speech on the day of Hirohito's death, in which Takeshita asserted that the war had broken out against [Hirohito's] wishes. Takeshita's statement provoked outrage in nations in East Asia and Commonwealth nations such as the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. For Fujiwara, however, “the thesis that the Emperor, as an organ of responsibility, could not reverse cabinet decision, is a myth fabricated after the war.”

In Japan, debate over the Emperor's responsibility was taboo while he was still alive. After his death, however, debate began to surface over the extent of his involvement and thus his culpability.

Derrick Henry “Dick” Lehmer (1905 – 1991) was an American mathematician who refined Édouard Lucas' work in the 1930s and devised the Lucas–Lehmer test for Mersenne primes. Lehmer's peripatetic career as a number theorist, with he and his wife taking numerous types of work in the United States and abroad to support themselves during the Great Depression, fortuitously brought him into the center of research into early electronic computing.

Historic sources present disparate accounts of Ivan's complex personality: he was described as intelligent and devout, yet given to rages and prone to episodic outbreaks of mental illness. One notable outburst may have resulted in the death of his groomed and chosen heir Ivan Ivanovich, which led to the passing of the Tsardom to the younger son: the weak and possibly intellectually disabled Feodor I of Russia. His contemporaries called him “Ivan Groznyi” the name, which, although usually translated as “Terrible”, actually means something closer to “Redoubtable” or “Severe” and carries connotations of might, power and strictness rather than horror or cruelty.

But then, the same day, PaidContent's founder Rafat Ali tweeted this: “Hearing unverified about 5 or so edit people at AOL resigned yesterday. Any specific reason besides general malaise?”

Back in July, Arianna Huffington's site caught flak for its aggregation practices. It suspended young reporter Amy Lee for exhibiting shoddy ethics, angering most critics who felt that the aggregation problem was endemic to the organization.

At the time, business editor Peter Goodman, himself a respected former Times staffer, defended his new outlet. Goodman said that a specific problem was being addressed, that such aggregation practices were not widespread or tolerated at HuffPost and that the site would “redouble efforts to make sure our reporters and editors understand that this sort of thing is unambiguously unacceptable.”

When Egan was pressed about her departure, she declined to go into detail. One can't read too much into that, but it is safe to assume that if it were entirely cordial she would have said as much — or stayed more than five months.

From a title: «Emacs Lisp vs Perl: Redux. Which Do You Prefer?»

The axiom of choice states that if you have a collection of sets, you can always form a new set by choosing one object from each of them. That sounds anodyne, but it comes with a sting: you can dream up some twisted initial sets that produce even stranger sets when you choose one element from each. The Polish mathematicians Stefan Banach and Alfred Tarski soon showed how the axiom could be used to divide the set of points defining a spherical ball into six subsets which could then be slid around to produce two balls of the same size as the original. That was a symptom of a fundamental problem: the axiom allowed peculiarly perverse sets of real numbers to exist whose properties could never be determined. If so, this was a grim portent for ever proving the continuum hypothesis.

Every once in a while, however, the mood would get “very ugly” and she would try to calm things down and remonstrate with people. “I would occasionally email them – they had to give their email addresses when registering for the site – to say, ‘Even though you are not writing under your real name, people can hear you.’” In those instances, strangely, she suggests, most people were incredibly contrite when contacted. It was like they had forgotten who they were. “They would send messages back saying, ‘Oh, I'm so sorry’, not even using the excuse of having a bad day or anything like that. It is so much to do with anonymity…”

Catherine Fitzpatrick: “I hate this kind of vacuous sectarian twaddle.”

The unique culinary art of Dim Sum originated with the Cantonese in southern China, who over the centuries transformed Yum Cha from a relaxing respite to a loud and happy dining experience.

In Germanic paganism, Thor (from Old Norse Þórr) is a hammer-wielding god associated with thunder, lightning, storms, oak trees, strength, destruction, fertility, healing, and the protection of mankind. The cognate deity in wider Germanic mythology was known in Old English as Þunor and in Old High German Donar (runic þonar ᚦᛟᚾᚨᚱ), stemming from a Common Germanic *Þunraz (meaning “thunder”).

as long as you wish to fuss about minutiae, at least get them right.

“How many engineers does Microsoft have?” Page asked.

About 25,000, he was told.

“We should have a million,” Page said, in all seriousness.

At that point, Schmidt put an avuncular hand on Page's shoulder and brought him back to the real world. Now, with Page as CEO, that hand is less likely to be there.

The fact that I had to market the book myself, and that onus was solely on me, was actually a blessing in disguise. It forced me to get expert help. In the past, I've tried on many occasions to promote my products myself. I've called up journalists, built up a mailing list of media contacts, blogged, Facebooked, twittered and done everything the marketing experts recommend you do, but it's never quite worked for me. And over the years, I reached a key epiphany. I've come to realise that there's something fundamentally different about you yourself telling a journalist that your product is great compared with someone else telling a journalist that your product is great.

Mostly consisting of dialogues between the titular Sophie and a mysterious man named Alberto Knox, interwoven with an increasingly bizarre and mysterious plot, it acts as both a novel and a basic guide to philosophy.

… and I frankly do not quite understand the depressingly defeatist attitude of those who think there is no use — a long journey starts with the first step …

The estimable James Gleick takes on four books — with emphasis on In The Plex — in this New York Review of Books article on Google. I especially appreciate his calling my book the most authoritative to date and also entertaining! As always, Gleick has interesting things to say about Google, particularly on its role in our efforts to deal with privacy in the Internet Age.

The Lexx is a bio-engineered, Manhattan-sized, planet-destroying bioship in the shape of a giant wingless dragonfly and also reminiscent of male genitalia. It was grown by ingesting organ collections from the protein bank on the Cluster, the seat of the Divine Order, for use by His Divine Shadow. The Lexx was originally intended as the ultimate deterrent: the threat of a weapon that could instantly obliterate any planet would keep the remaining “Heretic” worlds of the Light Universe in line, and those that refused to capitulate would be summarily destroyed to reinforce the point. This plan was foiled when the crew commandeered it to escape from the Cluster.

Swearing can have even more salubrious effects. Researchers at Keele University in Staffordshire, England reported in July 2009 that cursing can reduce physical pain. In their experiment, volunteers held their hands in ice water, first while cursing and then while using less objectionable phrases. Those who cursed were able to keep their hands submerged longer, an effect that was especially strong among volunteers who said they didn’t typically curse.

In 2004, the FCC imposed a record $550,000 fine on CBS for its broadcast of a Super Bowl half-time show (produced by then sister-unit MTV) in which singer Janet Jackson's breast was briefly exposed. It was the largest fine ever for a violation of federal decency laws. Following the incident CBS apologized to its viewers and denied foreknowledge of the event, which was broadcast live on TV. In 2008, a Philadelphia federal court annulled the fine imposed on CBS, labelling it “arbitrary and capricious”.

4. In 1979, Robert Jahn, then dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Princeton University, established the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) unit to study putative paranormal phenomena such as psychokinesis. Like Schmidt, Jahn was particularly interested in the possibility that people can predict and/or influence purely random subatomic processes. Given his superb academic and scientific credentials, his claims of success drew particular attention within the scientific community. When his laboratory closed in 2007, Jahn concluded that “over the laboratory’s 28-year history, thousands of such experiments, involving many millions of trials, were performed by several hundred operators. The observed effects were usually quite small, of the order of a few parts in ten thousand on average, but they compounded to highly significant statistical deviations from chance expectations” (PEAR, n.d.).

Much has been made of the negative light in which Julian Assange appears in the article. Wired's Kim Zetter published a digest piece, in which the more absurd claims of the piece are given particular attention but little critical treatment. The more colourful parts of the article were, predictably, grist to the celebrity gossip mill.

In the 1970s, after a long series of experiments, White performed a transplant of one monkey head onto the body of another monkey, although it lasted just a few days. These operations were continued and perfected to the point where the transplanted head could have survived indefinitely on its new body, though the animals were in fact euthanized. The problem with this operation is that since no one currently knows how to repair nerve damage which would arise when the spinal cord is severed during the head transplant process, the recipient would become paralyzed from the neck down.

In mid-2004, Jobs announced to his employees that he had been diagnosed with a cancerous tumor in his pancreas. The prognosis for pancreatic cancer is usually very grim; Jobs, however, stated that he had a rare, far less aggressive type known as islet cell neuroendocrine tumor.

RSS co-author and former Reddit co-owner Aaron Swartz has been arrested for surreptitiously downloading 4.8 million documents from JSTOR via the MIT network.

Like a Cold War spy case made public, the PR fiasco reveals—and ratchets up—the growing rivalry between Google and Facebook. Google, the search giant, views Facebook as a threat, and has been determined to fight back by launching a social-networking system of its own. So far, however, Google has not had much luck, but Facebook nonetheless felt it necessary to return fire—clandestinely.

We saw also a couple of Zorrillos, or skunks—odious animals, which are far from uncommon. In general appearance the Zorrillo resembles a polecat, but it is rather larger, and much thicker in proportion. Conscious of its power, it roams by day about the open plain, and fears neither dog nor man. If a dog is urged to the attack, its courage is instantly checked by a few drops of the fetid oil, which brings on violent sickness and running at the nose. Whatever is once polluted by it, is for ever useless. Azara says the smell can be perceived at a league distant; more than once, when entering the harbour of Monte Video, the wind being off shore, we have perceived the odour on board the Beagle. Certain it is, that every animal most willingly makes room for the Zorrillo. [from Charles Darwin's The Voyage of the Beagle]

So what, exactly, is the Web 2.0 movement? As an ideology, it is based upon a series of ethical assumptions about media, culture, and technology. It worships the creative amateur: the self-taught filmmaker, the dorm-room musician, the unpublished writer. It suggests that everyone — even the most poorly educated and inarticulate amongst us — can and should use digital media to express and realize themselves. Web 2.0 “empowers” our creativity, it “democratizes” media, it “levels the playing field” between experts and amateurs. The enemy of Web 2.0 is “elitist” traditional media.

This latter brings us to the second factor: the existence of some sort of overarching institutions, larger than states, usually religious in nature, that ensured that credit systems didn’t fly completely out of hand. For much of human history, the great social evil — the thing that everyone feared would lead to the utter breakdown of society — was the debt crisis. The masses of the poor would become indebted to the rich, they would lose their flocks and fields, begin selling family members into peonage and slavery, leading either to mass flight, uprisings, or a society so polarized that the majority were effectively (sometimes literally) reduced to slaves. In periods where economic transactions were conducted largely through cash, there are many parts of the world where this actually began happen. Periods dominated by credit money, where everyone recognized that money was just a promise, a social arrangement, almost invariably involve some kind of mechanism to protect debtors. Mesopotamian kings used to rely on their cosmic ability to recreate society to declare clean slates, erase all debts, and simply start over. In ancient Judea this was institutionalized in the seventh-year Jubilee. In the Middle Ages, Christian and Islamic bans on usury and debt peonage, far from being impediments to trade, were actually what made most trade possible, since they ensured ordinary people were not entirely impoverished, and had the means to purchase the merchants' wares, and because those religious systems became the foundation for networks of honor and trust.

While the precise structure of these higher infinities remained nebulous, a more immediate question frustrated Cantor. Was there an intermediate level between the countable infinity and the continuum? He suspected not, but was unable to prove it. His hunch about the non-existence of this mathematical mezzanine became known as the continuum hypothesis.

compunction follows my concscience like a remora.

Universities Snub Napster Ban Request

The comforting ethos of the [Star Trek] series was expressed not merely in the amity of the crew…

…[some companies] are teaming up with local partners to build plants in China and circumvent the country's nettlesome trade barriers.

One edict for Star Trek [script]: The crew of the Enterprise always gets along.

Once upon a time, riddles were respectable. Their antiquity and function can be guessed at from the word's origin in the Old English raedan, ‘a story or interpretation’, which is cognate with words meaning ‘counsel, opinion, conjecture’ and is also the origin of our modern word read.

Plenty of maladroit decisions were made.

He leans toward his interlocutor conspiratorially. [to whisper]

… plenty of people drive luxury cars and flout the rules

You can flout convention and you can flout authority, but you cannot use flaunt for flout.

the mob were sold by the politician's specious arguments.

Time heals emotional wounds, but apparently so do burly chauffeurs. Right after in the midst of her tiringly raucous breakup with husband Tom, Roseanne Arnold hired a 240-lb. driver and bodyguard.

He [John Dewey] is a man of the highest character, liberal in outlook, generous and kind in personal relations, indefatigable in work.

…experiments done at the behest of IBM.

a performance routine

renounced smoking