Matt
Palo Alto
Today I learned that "horse race" and "bowler hat" have the same number of letters.
ObPedantry: Cicero did indeed write philippics, but they were a long established literary form by his time. The name comes from Demosthenes's tirades against Philip II, centuries earlier.
@Fact Boy I'd heard a different story for the origin of the English word "tsarina": that it was a double-feminization via German. That is: the Germans used the feminine form "tsarin" for a Russian empress just as they would have used the word "kaiserin" for their own empress, and then English speakers took that German word and tacked on the English feminine ending "-a". I wonder which of those etymologies is correct.
15A is a funny example of a clue that seems less natural the closer you are to the subject. These days, "core" is the standard technical term for a kind of execution unit within a CPU. A typical Apple laptop or desktop has just one CPU but dozens of cores.
@Stephen Yeah, I had C# first too, not F#. I bet most people who had heard of either language did too. Either way... Does anyone actually spell out "S H A R P" when talking about either of those languages? In both cases I think the official name uses the # symbol.
@el Yeah, I didn't like that either. The plural of блин (blin) is блины (blini). The plural of blini is... I dunno, more blini?
@ST My impression is that physicists and mathematicians remember her for very different aspects of her work. I didn't know if a mathematician would hear "Noether's Theorem" and think of the same theorem that a theoretical physicist would.
@Gerry Kingsley Yeah, I was reluctant to let it be that. My first thought was that maybe there was a rebus or something that would let "lumens" fit, or maybe that this was misdirection that was playing on light as not-heavy, so I left it blank until crosses made it obvious.
@Steve L No. Bosons are named for the early 20th century physicist Satyendra Nath Bose, in honor of his work on the theory of what's now called Bose-Einstein statistics. The audio company was founded by an MIT electrical engineer named Amar Bose.
@Mango I wanted it to be ”complex", but that obviously didn't work.
@Keith Yeah, I was reluctant to fill today one in without crosses, since USSR would also have fit, and the four-letter abbreviation for Союз Советских Социалистических Республик doesn't use Latin letters even if they look a little like them.
@Steven M. But the Axiom of Choice is self evidently true! Unfortunately, as they say, the well-ordering theorem is self evidently false, and who can tell about Zorn's lemma?
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