Feedback from reader on the Middle Ages
“ . . . the Middle Ages or Medieval times spanned roughly the era from 900 or 1000 to 1500. In more recent history reading, I have discovered that some historians now question when the Middle Ages actually ended or was supplanted by the Renaissance. It seems that this differs for various parts of Europe and depends on which cultural and political measure one uses for the advent of the Renaissance and Modern era.”

Sometime after the fall of Rome, we come to the Dark Ages. Most of Europe was decentralized, rural, parochial. Life was reduced to the “laws of nature:” The powerful ruled, while the powerless looked only to survive. There was no sense of history or progress. Superstition and fatalism prevailed. Belief in the imminent end of the world was common every century. Universities developed out of monastery and cathedral schools—really what we would call elementary schools, but attended by adolescents and taught by monks and priests. The first was in Bologna, established in 1088. In these schools and universities, students began with the trivium: grammar, rhetoric and logic.
Beyond that, they would study the quadrivium: arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. All together, these subjects make up the seven liberal arts. http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/middleages.html

BookServer is an open system to find, buy, or borrow e- books
Internet Archive BookServer: "The widespread success of digital reading devices has proven that the world is ready to read books on screens. As the audience for digital books grows, we can evolve from an environment of single devices connected to single sources into a distributed system where readers can find books from sources across the Web to read on whatever device they have. Publishers are creating digital versions of their popular books, and the library community is creating digital archives of their printed collections. BookServer is an open system to find, buy, or borrow these books, just like we use an open system to find Web sites. The BookServer is a growing open architecture for vending and lending digital books over the Internet. Built on open catalog and open book formats, the BookServer model allows a wide network of publishers, booksellers, libraries, and even authors to make their catalogs of books available directly to readers through their laptops, phones, netbooks, or dedicated reading devices. BookServer facilitates pay transactions, borrowing books from libraries, and downloading free, publicly accessible books."

HHS OIG: Medicare Part D Plan Sponsor Electronic Prescribing Initiatives
Medicare Part D Plan Sponsor Electronic Prescribing Initiatives (OEI-05-08-00322), Otober 16, 2009
"E-prescribing occurs when a prescriber uses a computer or an electronic hand-held device, such as a personal digital assistant, to write and send a prescription directly to a dispenser. Before a prescriber sends a prescription to a dispenser, he or she can request electronic data regarding patient eligibility, formulary and benefits, and medication history from the patient’s health insurance plan."

What is Indian summer?
The term "Indian Summer" is generally associated with a period of considerably above normal temperatures, accompanied by dry and hazy conditions ushered in on a south or southwesterly breeze. Several references make note of the fact that a true Indian Summer can not occur until there has been a killing frost or freeze. Since frost and freezing temperatures generally work their way south through the fall, this would give credence to the possibility of several Indian Summers occurring in a fall, especially across the northern areas where frost or freezes usually come early. Evidently, some writers have made reference to it as native only to New England, while others have stated it happens over most of the United States, even along the Pacific coast. Probably the most common or accepted view on location for an Indian Summer would be from the Mid-Atlantic states north into New England, and than west across the Ohio Valley, Great Lakes, Midwest and Great Plains States. http://www.usatoday.com/weather/resources/basics/indian-summer.htm

European scientists announced on October 18 that they’ve discovered 32 brand spanking new planets. Don’t bother looking out your window, it’s not like you’re going to see them or anything. They’re outside of our solar system. Because they are outside of our solar system, they are classified as “exoplanets.” The exoplanets were discovered by the HARPS (High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher) team on the European Southern Observatory’s 3.6 meter telescope in Chile http://features.csmonitor.com/innovation/2009/10/19/wow-32-new-planets-discovered-these-giant-exoplanets-dwarf-the-earth/

Civility is shown by debating teams in high school and college using measured words, and making specific points about what they are for.
Incivility is shown by those people who rant, shout insults at their opponents, and state in general terms what they are against.

To your health Search for drug information, diseases and conditions at:
http://pdrhealth.com/home/home.aspx

Shaggy dog stories, part 2—Influences on the shaggy dog story are epigrams, limericks, clerihew, tall stories, whoppers. They lead to unexpected, sudden (and sometimes unrelated) endings.
An epigram was originally, an inscription on a monument; the term is now used of tersely expressed witty sayings in general, but particularly of any short poem which has a sharp turn of thought or point, be it witty, amusing, dramatic, or satiric. The eighteenth century was particularly rich in epigrams, which generally take the shape of a couplet or a quatrain. Also is the name of a student newspaper at the University of Bristol, and is the name of a programming language.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&defl=en&q=define:epigram&ei=KZfdSqucEJON8Aad4aFn&sa=X&oi=glossary_definition&ct=title&ved=0CAwQkAE
Limerick is:
port city in southwestern Ireland
a humorous verse form of 5 anapestic lines with a rhyme scheme aabba
wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn
An anapaest or anapest, also called antidactylus, is a metrical foot used in formal poetry. In classical quantitative meters it consists of two short syllables followed by a long one (as in a-na-paest); in accentual stress meters it consists of two unstressed syllables followed by one stressed ...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anapestic
A clerihew is a whimsical, four-line biographical poem invented by Edmund Clerihew Bentley. The lines are comically irregular in length, and the ...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clerihew

Twitter and Status Updating, Fall 2009, by Susannah Fox, Kathryn Zickuhr, Aaron Smith - Oct 21, 2009 "Some 19% of internet users now say they use Twitter or another service to share updates about themselves, or to see updates about others. This represents a significant increase over previous surveys in December 2008 and April 2009, when 11% of internet users said they use a status-update service. Three groups of internet users are mainly responsible for driving the growth of this activity: social network website users, those who connect to the internet via mobile devices, and younger internet users—those under age 44."
Pew study: Nearly 1 in 5 Net users is tweeting - Twitter’s growth partially due to those on the go who use mobile Internet

Current Economic Conditions - Federal Reserve District Beige Book, October 21, 2009 - Full Report and Districts
"Reports from the 12 Federal Reserve Districts indicated either stabilization or modest improvements in many sectors since the last report, albeit often from depressed levels. Leading the more positive sector reports among Districts were residential real estate and manufacturing, both of which continued a pattern of improvement that emerged over the summer. Reports on consumer spending and nonfinancial services were mixed. Commercial real estate was reported to be one of the weakest sectors, although reports of weakness or moderate decline were frequently noted in other sectors. Reports of gains in economic activity generally outnumber declines, but virtually every reference to improvement was qualified as either small or scattered. For example, Dallas cited slight improvements residential real estate and staffing firms, while New York noted gains only in a few sectors (predominantly manufacturing and retail). Retail and manufacturing conditions were mixed in Boston, but some signs of improvement were reported. New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and San Francisco cited small pickups in manufacturing activity. In the Kansas City District, an uptick was noted in technology firms, while services firms posted revenue gains in Richmond. However, conditions were referred to as stable or flat for business services and tourism firms in Minneapolis and agriculture in St. Louis and Kansas City."

Google, the powerhouse of Silicon Valley, and AT&T, champion for the old-line phone industry, are marshaling political allies, lobbyists and—in AT&T's case—labor unions for a fight over proposed "net neutrality" rules that could affect tens of billions of dollars in investments needed to upgrade the U.S. broadband network, which lags in speed and affordability compared with some countries. On October 22, the Federal Communications Commission made good on its promise to push new rules that would require Internet providers such as AT&T to deliver Web traffic without delay. Broadly, that means cable and phone companies couldn't block or slow access to services from Google, Netflix or others that are a drain on their networks or could compete with their businesses. But as the details of the new rules are hammered out in coming months, AT&T and Google are ramping up efforts to ensure the FCC doesn't impose rules that could hurt their profits or expansion plans. Google's success at getting the FCC to embrace its vision of the Internet hasn't been matched at other agencies. Last month, the Justice Department urged a federal appeals court to reject a settlement between Google and the Authors Guild and Publishers over its book search service. A Federal Trade Commission investigation prompted Google CEO Eric Schmidt to leave Apple Inc.'s board and Genentech Inc. CEO Arthur Levinson to leave Google's board. Meanwhile, both Congress and the FTC have expressed concerns about current online advertising and privacy practices of Internet companies including Google. Consumer groups have also weighed in, along with advocacy groups such as the Future of Privacy Forum, which is funded by AT&T. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704224004574489323364051390.html?mod=rss_Today's_Most_Popular

In honor of Microsoft’s new Windows 7 operating system, Burger King has served up a seven-patty burger. This mighty monolith of meat, more than five inches tall, will only be available for seven days—and only in Japan. The Windows 7 burger favors the early birds. Each day, the first 30 customers get the Whopper for 777 Yen (about $8.50). Stragglers must pay closer to $17. But if you feast upon one for breakfast, you’d best avoid food for the rest of the day. The Whopper packs in about 2,100 calories—more than you should eat in an entire day, according to the FDA.
http://features.csmonitor.com/innovation/2009/10/23/only-in-japan-the-burger-king-wi
ndows-7-whopper/

October 24 is the birthday of Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, born in Delft, the Netherlands (1632), who was working as a draper when he happened to use a magnifying lens to count the number of threads in a piece of cloth, and the experience got him interested in lenses. He began to spend all his spare time learning how to grind out lenses and use them in combination with each other to look at smaller and smaller things. Over his lifetime, he ground more than 400 lenses and built many microscopes, using techniques that he kept secret. He developed the first microscope that could show things too small for the human eye to see, and he became the first person ever to observe bacteria. He was also the first person to see red blood cells, and the first person to explain how insects breed, because he could see their tiny eggs.
October 26 is the birthday of medical doctor and anthropologist Paul Farmer born in North Adams, Massachusetts (1959) and the subject of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Tracy Kidder's (books by this author) recent book: Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, A Man Who Would Cure the World (2003). He specializes in infectious diseases, and sets up hospitals and community health centers to provide free health care to the world's poor. The Writer’s Almanac