Faldo, Nick (b. July 18, 1957, Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire, Eng.) British golfer. Faldo turned professional in 1976 and played the first of 11 successive Ryder Cup matches in 1977. He subsequently won three Masters (1989, 1990, 1996), three British Opens (1987, 1990, 1992), and many other international tournaments. In 1990 he became the first non- American to be named the PGA Player of the Year.
Falkland Islands Spanish Islas Malvinas Ves-.las-mal-'be-nasV British overseas territory (pop., 2001: 2,491), in the southwestern South Atlantic Ocean. Located about 300 mi (480 km) northeast of the south¬ ern tip of South America, the Falklands are made up of two main islands, East Falkland and West Falkland, and about 200 smaller islands. The islands are spread out over some 4,700 sq mi (12,200 sq km). The capi¬ tal is Stanley, on East Falkland. The population is English-speaking and of British descent. The economy is based on sheep raising. The French founded the islands’ first settlement, on East Falkland in 1764, and the British settled West Falkland in 1765. In 1770 the Spanish purchased the French settlement and expelled the British, but the latter’s settlement was restored in 1771. In 1820 Argentina proclaimed its sovereignty over the Falklands, but the British took them back in 1833. Argentina invaded in 1982, and the British reclaimed the islands after a brief conflict (see Falk¬ land Islands War).
Falkland Islands War or Malvinas War (1982) Brief but unde¬ clared war between Argentina and Great Britain over control of the Falk¬ land Islands (Islas Malvinas) and associated island dependencies. Both countries long had claimed sovereignty over the Falklands and had been in protracted negotiations over them. On April 2, 1982, Argentina’s mili¬ tary government, impatient with the negotiations, occupied the islands with some 10,000 troops. British prime minister Margaret Thatcher responded by sending a naval task force to the region, and within three months British forces had defeated the Argentines and reoccupied the islands. Britain lost about 250 men, and Argentina about 700. Argentina’s defeat discredited its military government and helped lead to the resto¬ ration of civilian rule in 1983.
Fall, Albert Bacon (b. Nov. 26, 1861, Frankfort, Ky., U.S.—d. Nov. 30, 1944, El Paso, Texas) U.S. secretary of the interior (1921-23). He began practicing law in New Mexico Territory in 1889. He served in the U.S. Senate from 1913 to 1921, when he was appointed Secretary of the Interior by Pres. Warren G. Harding. He resigned his cabinet post two years later and returned to New Mexico. In 1924 a Senate investigation revealed that Fall had accepted a large bribe to lease to private oil inter¬ ests, without competitive bidding, naval oil reserve lands in the Teapot Dome reserve in Wyoming and other reserves in California. He was con¬
victed of bribery in 1929 and served nine months of a one-year prison sentence. See also Teapot Dome scandal.
Falla \'fa-yo\, Manuel de (b. Nov. 23, 1876, Cadiz, Spain—d. Nov. 14, 1946, Alta Gracia, Arg.) Spanish composer. He studied with Felipe Pedrell and conceived a powerful musical nationalism. His first major work was the opera La vida breve (1905). He lived in Paris (1907-14), where he absorbed the music of Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, and oth¬ ers. The intensely Spanish ballet El amor brujo (1915) gained him fur¬ ther acclaim. The Spanish Civil War caused him to leave Spain for Argentina c. 1938, and he never returned. His other works include Nights in the Gardens of Spain (1915), The Three-Cornered Hat (1919), the pup¬ pet opera El retablo de maese Pedro (1923; with Federico Garcia Lorca), a harpsichord concerto (1926), and the huge unfinished oratorio L 'Atldntida. He is regarded as the greatest Spanish composer of the 20th century.
fallacy, formal and informal In philosophy, reasoning that fails to establish its conclusion because of deficiencies in form or wording. For¬ mal fallacies are types of deductive argument that instantiate an invalid inference pattern (see deduction; validity); an example is “affirming the consequent: If A then B; B; therefore. A.” Informal fallacies are types of inductive argument the premises of which fail to establish the conclusion because of their content. There are many kinds of informal fallacy; examples include argumentum ad hominem (“argument against the man”), which consists of attacking the arguer instead of his argument; the fallacy of false cause, which consists of arguing from the premise that one event precedes another to the conclusion that the first event is the cause of the second; the fallacy of composition, which consists of arguing from the premise that a part of a thing has a certain property to the conclusion that the thing itself has that property; and the fallacy of equivocation, which consists of arguing from a premise in which a term is used in one sense to a conclusion in which the term is used in another sense.
Fallen Timbers, Battle of (Aug. 20, 1794) Decisive victory of U.S. Gen. Anthony Wayne over the northwestern Indian Confederation, secur¬ ing white settlement of former Indian territory, mainly in Ohio. Wayne led more than 1,000 soldiers to confront the 2,000 Indians, who had been promised British support and who had gathered behind a protective tangle of fallen trees along the Maumee River (near modern Toledo). The Indi¬ ans, abandoned by the British, fled in disarray. A treaty in 1795 ceded Indian lands to the U.S. and ended British influence in the area.
Fallopius \fo-To-pe-ds\, Gabriel Italian Gabriello Fallopio (b.
1523, Modena—d. Oct. 9, 1562, Padua) Italian anatomist. He contributed greatly to knowledge of the ear and reproductive system. His observa¬ tions of the dissection of cadavers are outlined in Observationes anatom- icae (1561). He discovered the fallopian tubes, which connect the ovaries to the uterus, and several major nerves of the head and face. He described the semicircular canals in the ear and named the vagina, placenta, clito¬ ris, palate, and cochlea. He and Andreas Vesalius overturned many of Galen’s principles, a development essential to Renaissance medicine.
fallout Descent of radioactive materials from the atmosphere to the earth. Radioactivity in the atmosphere may arise from natural causes such as cosmic rays as well as from nuclear explosions and atomic reactor operations. The explosion of nuclear weapons leads to three types of fall¬ out: local, tropospheric, and stratospheric. The first, intense but relatively short-lived, occurs as larger radioactive particles are deposited near the site of the explosion. Tropospheric fallout occurs when the finer particles enter the troposphere, and it spreads over a larger area in the month after the explosion. Stratospheric fallout, made of fine particles in the strato¬ sphere, may continue years after the explosion, and the distribution is nearly worldwide. Many different radioisotopes are formed during a nuclear explosion, but only long-lived isotopes (e.g., cesium- 137, strontium-90) are deposited as stratospheric fallout.
Falloux Law \fa-Tii\ (1850) Act granting legal status to independent secondary schools in France. It was sponsored by Count Frederic-Alfred- Pierre de Falloux (1811-1886), minister of education in the Second Repub¬ lic, and one of its main architects was a Catholic bishop, Felix-Antoine- Philibert Dupanloup (1802-1878). Under the guise of freedom of education, it restored much of the church’s traditional influence.