Louis Braille was born on January 4, 1809, at Coupvray, near Paris, France. His father, Simon-René Braille, was a harness and saddle maker. At the age of three, Braille injured his left eye with a stitching awl from his father's workshop. This destroyed his left eye, and sympathetic ophthalmia led to loss of vision in his right eye. Braille was completely blind by the age of four. At age 10, he was sent to Paris to live and study at the Royal Institute for Blind Youth, the world's first of its kind. At the school, the children were taught basic craftsman's skills and simple trades. They were also taught how to read by feeling raised letters (a system devised by the school's founder, Valentin Haüy). He thought there had to be a better, easier, and faster way for the blind to read, and was determined to invent it.
From age 12 to 15, he experimented with codes, using a knitting needle to punch holes in paper to represent letters. He shared his progress with officials at the institute but wasn't taken seriously. Braille, a bright and creative student, became a talented cellist and organist in his time at the school, playing the organ for churches all over France. When Louis was fifteen, he developed an ingenious system of reading and writing by means of raised dots. Two years later he adapted his method to musical notation. He used a pattern of 6 raised dots to represent letters, numbers, punctuation marks, and mathematical symbols. Louis showed his Braille method to his classmates who liked it and began using it, in spite of the fact that it was banned from the institute. At age 17, Louis graduated, became assistant teacher at the institute, and secretly taught his method. Mr. Braille accepted a full-time teaching position at the Institute when he was nineteen.
Braille later extended his system to include notation for mathematics and music. The first book in Braille was published in 1827 under the title Method of Writing Words, Music, and Plain Songs by Means of Dots, for Use by the Blind and Arranged for Them. http://www.ideafinder.com/history/inventors/braille.htm

Find stories about inventions and innovations here: http://www.ideafinder.com/history/index.html

World Ocean Census: A Global Survey of Marine Life
The Deep Sea World Beyond Sunlight - From the Edge of Darkness to the Black Abyss: Marine Scientists Census 17,500+ Species and Counting: Census of Marine Life scientists have inventoried an astonishing abundance, diversity and distribution of deep sea species that have never known sunlight—creatures that somehow manage a living in a frigid black world down to 5,000 meters below the ocean waves. Revealed via deep-towed cameras, sonar and other vanguard technologies, animals known to thrive in an eternal watery darkness now number 17,650, a diverse collection of species ranging from crabs to shrimp to worms. Most have adapted to diets based on meager droppings from the sunlit layer above, others to diets of bacteria that break down oil, sulfur and methane, the sunken bones of dead whales and other implausible foods.

EPA - New Trends Report: Fuel Economy Increases as CO2 Decreases
News release : "For the fifth consecutive year, EPA is reporting an increase in fuel efficiency with a corresponding decrease in average carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions for new cars and light duty trucks. This marks the first time that data for CO2 emissions are included in the annual report, Light-Duty Automotive Technology, Carbon Dioxide Emissions, and Fuel Economy Trends: 1975 through 2009."

Britspeak from the novel Starburst by Robin Pilcher
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Robin Pilcher is a British author, the eldest son of author Rosamunde Pilcher. Robin Pilcher has been a cameraman, a songwriter, and a farmer, co-managed a mail order business, and has had numerous other jobs. He lives with his wife and children near Dundee, Scotland, and in the Sierra de Aracena mountain area of Andalusia, Spain, where he plans to establish a writing institute supported by the Pilcher Foundation of Creative Writing. http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/p/robin-pilcher/

In the Food Issue of The New Yorker, November 23, 2009, Evan Osnos writes about China’s sudden romance with wine. The notion of getting rich by selling wine in China has a long history, which is marked almost entirely by failure. When the Changyu winery opened in 1892, the first winemaker was an Austro-Hungarian diplomat named Baron M. von Babo. When he took the job, Baron von Babo boldly ordered a hundred and forty thousand seedlings from abroad in order to start a vineyard. But seventy per cent of them died before they reached Chinese soil. Prospects have sharply improved since the days of the Baron, and, today, China is one of the world’s fastest-growing wine markets. (Chinese buyers are consuming so much that they are affecting wine prices for some of the most expensive bottles.) http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/evanosnos/2009/11/red-red-wine.html
Because China is in the thrall of conspicuous consumption, a wine importer said: “In our shops, if we have slow-moving items, we raise the price.”

Silent letters: gnat, gnu, gnash, gnaw See a list at: http://literacy.kent.edu/Midwest/Materials/ndakota/soup/silent_letters.pdf

Not all silent letters are completely redundant:
Silent letters can distinguish between homophones, e.g. in/inn; be/bee; lent/leant. This is an aid to readers already familiar with both words.
Silent letters may give an insight into the meaning or origin of a word, e.g. vineyard suggests vines more than the phonetic *vinyard would.
The final in giraffe gives a clue to the second-syllable stress, where *giraf might suggest initial-stress.
Silent letters arise in several ways:
Pronunciation changes occurring without a spelling change. The spelling was in Old English pronounced /x/ in such words as light.
Sound distinctions from foreign languages may be lost, as with the distinction between smooth rho (ρ) and roughly aspirated rho (ῥ) in Ancient Greek, represented by and in Latin, but merged to the same [r] in English. Similarly with / , the latter from Greek phi.
Clusters of consonants may be simplified, producing silent letters e.g. silent in asthma, silent in Christmas. Similarly with alien clusters such as Greek initial in psychology and in mnemonic.
Occasionally, spurious letters are consciously inserted in spelling. The b in debt and doubt was inserted to reflect Latin cognates like debit and dubitable.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_letter