Difference between revisions of "F"

Revision as of 16:57, 24 December 2006

Fabian
397; fiancé of Urania, in Williamsburg; Fabian means cautious, inclined to using delaying tactics (hence quoits?). And there's that Fabian Society, founded 1884 for the gradual introduction into the US of Socialism, named after Quintus Fabius Maximus.

Factors
251; "Warehouses of the" at Scanderoon

Fair Anchor, The
271

Falconer, Captain
258; of the Falmouth Packet; Dixon gives him Emerson's Watch for safekeeping, 318

96; Falmouth is at the mouth of the River Fal, in Cornwall at the southwestern tip of England; a "packet" is a passenger boat carrying mail and cargo on a regular schedule; 317; 704

False Bay
On the southern part of Cape Peninsula; the area is also known as Constantia; MAP

falsum in unum Principle
132;

Fang
24; aka Learnéd English Dog; 644

farinaceous
739; rich in starch, or having a mealy texture

Farlow, Robert
446; on M-D Line crew; 460; 492

Fatum in Denario vertit
674; Latin: "Misfortune turns into money" ("If you get a lemon, make lemonade")

Faust
558

Feather Row
185; There remains a Feathers Place at the bottom of Greenwich Park, a short walk from the observatory.

426; Voam's [t.html#torpedo">torpedo</A> (electrick eel); 469

Fell
215; a barren field

Felucca
252; a narrow sailing ship usu. in the Mediterranean

Feng Shui
229; Feng Shui (pronounced "phong shway") is a Chinese philosophy, developed over 5,000 years ago, about the relationship between humans and their environment. It is about how everything in our external environment has a connection to our inner, spirtual world, and affects our well-being; 288; 487; "that undifferentiated condition before Light and Dark,--earth and Sky, man and Woman,--a return to that Holy Silence which the Word broke, and the multiplexity of matter has ever since kept hidden, Above from Below, the map from the mapped" (Tao De Jing, describing Feng Shui), 523; 542; Feng Shui Website

Fepp, Highwayman
111

Fermat's Last Theorem
336; Pierre de Fermat (1601-1665) was a lawyer and amateur mathematician. In about 1637, he annotated his copy (now lost) of Bachet's translation of Diophantus' Arithmetika with a theorem of which he never published the proof; The Whole Story; Wikipedia entry

The Execution of Lord Ferrers at Tyburn in 1760

111; Laurence Shirley, 4th Earl Ferrers (August 18, 1720 – May 5, 1760) was the last aristocrat hanged in England, for shooting and killing the steward charged with receiving rents. Ferrers pleaded insanity but was convicted of murder, none the less. On May 5, 1760, dressed in a light colored suit embroidered with silver (the outfit he had worn at his wedding), he was taken in his own carriage from the Tower of London to Tyburn and there hanged. It has been said that as a concession to his order the rope used was of silk;

hanging of, 111; Details of the Hanging; Wikipedia entry

511-17; of Conestoga (named), 532

Fields, Joseph
536; Eliza's father, of Conestoga Creek

Fields, Seth
511; husband of Eliza, 540

Fifty-five
330; 1755

Figg, the Great
389; bladesman (knife-fighter)

Finger, Great
189; "reaching in from the Distance, pausing at Draco"; That Finger in Gravity's Rainbow

Finger of Corsica
726

634; The oldest surviving texts of the Gr�nlendinga saga (or Vinland Saga) are found in the Flateyjarbók written between 1382 and 1395 for a wealth farmer Jon Hakonarsson. The family heirloom was eventually given to an Icelandic bishop, who in turn presented it to the king of Denmark in the seventeen century. The Flateyjarbók is now in the Royal library of Copenhagen

"Finnbogi saga ins ramma" (The Saga of Finnbogi the Strong) is one of the last Old Icelandic Family Sagas. Of considerable interest to folklorists and students of comparative literature courses, this saga purportedly recounts the life adventures of one Finnbogi Asbjornson, a tenth century Icelander renowned for his prodigious strength. Although external evidence does suggest that there was indeed someone name Finnbogi, born in Flateyjardale, who lived in Vididale and Trekyllisvik, it can not be proven. ^[1]

And this, from a now-defunct website:

Two brothers from Iceland, Helgi and Finnbogi, came to Greenland. Freydis, daughter of Eric the Red, went with the brothers to Vinland. In Vinland there came up some disagreement between the two groups of settlers and Freydis lied to her husband that Helgi and Finnbogi had mistreated her. Then Freydis's husband and his men attacked the group of Helgi and Finnbogi. Freydis's men killed Helgi and Finnbogi and all the men in their group. Freydis herself killed five women. They then went back to Greenland. When Leifur found out what had happened he got very angry. But he couldn't do anything because Freydis, the murderess, was his sister.

Fiona
563; dancing girl in the Black Hole of Calcutta

142; an English astronomer who suggested to King Charles II that he establish a royal observatory, which King Charles did (at Greenwich in 1676) and appointed Flamsteed first astronomer royal; 211; 438; 479; 772

Flanders
230

Flautuer
668

Flight
517; 531; Dixon's over the Fells, 596; 296; 625; 651; 677; 740

Florinda
109

214; "A Dramatic Pastoral, in Three Acts" written by David Garrick in 1758; Read the play...; Florizel and Perdita are also the young lovers in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale (1592-94) which was based on Robert Greene's romantic nouvella, Pandosta (1588);

298; Aka Fleur de Lys, being the origin of the heraldic emblem of the Kings of France. The legend is that early in the sixth century, the Frankish King Clovis, faced with defeat in battle, was induced to pray for victory to the god of his Christian wife, Clothilde. He conquered and became a Christian and thereupon replaced the three toads on his banner by three Irises, the Iris being the Virgin's flower. in Locust-Street, Philadelphia; "Flower of Light" 688

Flux
237; O.E.D.: to bleed/flow copiously; in this instance: menstruation

Fluxions
220; the Method of Fluxions is a branch of differential calculus concerned chiefly with the study of the rate of change of functions with respect to their variables especially through the use of derivatives and differentials:

"Type II superconductors, however, permit the field to penetrate through the sample in quantized amounts of flux. These quanta are comprised of circulating vortices of current and the flux contained in the vortices. The total flux in a vortex is 2 x 10-7 Gauss-cm2. Great numbers of these vortices, or fluxoids as they are frequently called, can exist in a superconductor. For example, at a field intensity of 80 kilogauss (8 Tesla) there are 4 x 1011 fluxoids/cm2. These fluxoids and their interactions with defects in the superconductor give rise to the high current carrying capabilities of superconducting magnets." ^[2]

602; 721

Fops
21; 314

"For He's A Jolly Good Fellow"
118

Fort Detroit
674

Fort George
566; founded in New York by the East India Co and later became Madras where Bodine jumps ship (p566); where Zacharia Hood was granted refuge, 570

Fort Loudon
490

Fort Pitt
330; Fort Pitt stood (some ruins remain) at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers, in Western Pennsylvania, where they form the Ohio River. Originally a French fort named Fort Duquesne, it was renamed Fort Pitt when English took it in 1758; the English also named the place Pitts-bourgh on the same day; 661

Fort Stanwix
531; Built in 1758 to guard a strategic portage along a major transportation route, ... Fort Stanwix guarded the centuries old Oneida Carrying Place. This strategic Iroquois Confederacy portage in upstate New York bridged the waterways between the Atlantic Ocean and the Great Lakes. The events that occurred at the site included the development of European and later American-Indian affairs, the melding of diverse cultures, and the protection of the Mohawk Valley during two world wars: the French and Indian, and the American Revolutionary Wars.

Fortune
176

Fort William, Calcutta
152; location of Black Hole of Calcutta, in the 9' x 7'6" room of which "146 Europeans were oblig'd to spend the night of 20-21 June 1756"

First, a wee joak:

How Scotland was Created

At the beginning of time God was discussing the creation of the world with the Angel Gabriel. Leaning back in His golden throne, He told him of His plans for Scotland.

"Gabriel," said God, "I am going to give Scotland towering mountains and magnificent glens resplendent with purple heather. Red deer will roam the countryside, golden eagles will circle in the skies, salmon will leap in the crystal clear rivers and lochs, and the surrounding seas will team with fish. Agriculture will flourish and there will be a glorious coming together of water with barley to be known as whisky. Coal, oil. and gas - all will be there. The Scots will be intelligent, innovative, industrious and......."

"Wait a minute!" interrupted Gabriel. "Are you not being just a wee bit too generous to these Scots?"

But the Almighty replied, "Not really. I haven't told you yet who their neighbours are going to be!"

311; In 1745 the Scottish Jacobites (aka the Highlanders), led by Prince Charles Edward Stuart ("Bonnie Prince Charlie," the grandson of James II), rose up against the British in a last attempt to restore the Stuarts to the throne. The rebellion was quashed at the Battle of Culloden in January 1746. This lost battle ended the risings of the Jacobites, though Prince Charles escaped and went into hiding for several months before leaving Scotland; After 1745, the English banned the Scottish Clan system, the kilt, many of the loved Scottish traditions and were particularly harsh in the punishment of holdouts; 745; Blind Jack Metcalf and; MORE

Fougueuse, La
567; French: "the impetuous one"; "a French Bomb-Ketch"

38; Dixon follows it by deciding to answer "that of God" in Mason; Charles James Fox (1749-1806), born in London, was a British [w.html#whigs">Whig</a> politician, a fast living, hard gambling & drinking man who opposed tyranny and maintained a generous bearing towards his opponents (preferring to see beyond their faults to "that of God" in them). His support for the French Revolution led to the demise of his cherished friendship with Edmund Burke over the issue. Although I haven't located the exact quote to which Pynchon refers, here's another Fox bon mot:

Equality of opportunity and equality of result are entirely alien to each other. Men are entitled to equal rights — but to equal rights to unequal things.

Mandelbrot Set

In colloquial usage, a fractal is "a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be subdivided in parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced/size copy of the whole." ^[3] The term was coined by Benoît Mandelbrot in 1975 and was derived from the Latin fractus meaning broken or fractured.

A fractal as a geometric object generally has the following features:

• fine structure at arbitrarily small scales
• is too irregular to be easily described in traditional Euclidean geometric language.
• is self-similar (at least approximatively or stochastically)
• has a Hausdorff dimension that is greater than its topological dimension (although this requirement is not met by space-filling curves such as the Hilbert curve)
• has a simple and recursive definition. ^[4]

Because they appear similar at all levels of magnification, fractals are often considered to be 'infinitely complex'. Obvious examples include clouds, mountain ranges and lightning bolts. However, not all self-similar objects are fractals — for example, the real line (a straight Euclidean line) is formally self-similar but fails to have other fractal characteristics.

"this slavery within Slavery" 150; 204; "Shoreline tending to Infinite Length" 354; "'as above, so below'" 721; Fractal Geometry Website; Wikipedia entry

266; American statesman, scientist, inventor and writer; interrogating Mason & Dixon about their connections, 268-69; as Poor Richard ("Let us go out into the Nights Main Drama!"), 294-95; and the Paxton Boys, 310; "out in the Thunder-Gusts" 394; 442; 463; 488; "Toy image of" 548; "American Promotheus" 565; "success in London" 613; 656; 760; and the New Style; MORE; Wikipedia entry

Franz
217

Frederick
659; his "rank'd Automata"

Frederick of Prussia (1712-86) (reigned 1740-86)
160; aka Frederick II, the Great; 550

Frederick the Third
612; Frederik III (1609-70) was king of Denmark and Norway from 1648 to his death; he founded the Royal Library in Copenhagen.

Freemasons
394; 479

FRENCH TRANSLATIONS

Fret
243-44; ornamental network

Friar's Valley
174; on St. Helena

Friendly Islands
319

Friggs
658; Philadelphia land speculator at M-D Line

Frikkadel
146; dish which Dixon "reinvented"

Fritz
551; "a couple of"

Frizzen and Flint
343; In 18th & 19th c. guns and pistols, the flintlock was a lock having a flint in the hammer (aka "frizzen") for striking a spark to ignite the charge; MORE

Frome
181; the River Frome rises in the Cotswolds near Miserden and then follows a rather U-shaped course past Edgewotth and Chalford before running through Stroud and on into the Severn to the SW of Gloucester.

Fry, Professor
395

Fuh-kien School
544

Fulhams
25; loaded dice

Futurity
Aka "the future"; Gateways to, 19; 118; 163; 182; 195; 196; 212; 297; 333; 499; 569; 574

References

1. ↑ The Saga of Finnbogi the Strong
2. ↑ More from this Website
3. ↑ Falconer, Kenneth, Fractal Geometry: Mathematical Foundations and Applications, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., 2003, xxxv, ISBN 0-470-84862-6
4. ↑ Falconer, Kenneth (2003). Fractal Geometry: Mathematical Foundations and Applications. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., xxv. ISBN 0-470-84862-6.