Publishers Can Now Opt Out of Google News Search Indexing
Google News Blog: "There are more than 25,000 publishers from around the world in Google News today. [With] the new Google News web crawler publishers [can]...keep their content out of Google News and still remain in Google Search...if a publisher wants to opt out of Google News, they don't even have to contact us—they can put instructions just for user-agent Googlebot-News in the same robots.txt file they have today. In addition, once this change is fully in place, it will allow publishers to do more than just allow/disallow access to Google News. They'll also be able to apply the full range of REP directives just to Google News. Want to block images from Google News, but not from Web Search? Go ahead. Want to include snippets in Google News, but not in Web Search? Feel free...All this will soon be possible with the same standard protocol that is Robots Exclusion Protocol (or REP)."

Federal Reserve Beige Book, December 2, 2009
Full Report - Beige Book, December 2, 2009 - Summary of Commentary on Current Economic Conditions by Federal Reserve District, and link to reports by Districts.
"Reports from the twelve Federal Reserve Districts indicate that economic conditions have generally improved modestly since the last report. Eight Districts indicated some pickup in activity or improvement in conditions, while the remaining four--Philadelphia, Cleveland, Richmond, and Atlanta--reported that conditions were little changed and/or mixed. Consumer spending was reported to have picked up moderately since the last report, for both general merchandise and vehicles; a number of Districts noted relatively robust sales of used autos. Most Districts indicated that non-auto retailers were holding lean inventories going into the holiday season. Tourism activity varied across Districts. Manufacturing conditions were said to be, on balance, steady to moderately improving across most of the country, while conditions in the nonfinancial service sector generally strengthened somewhat, though with some variation across Districts and across industries. Residential real estate conditions were somewhat improved from very low levels, on balance, led by the lower end of the market."

In October, Columbia University Press published Andrew Smith's latest book, Eating History: 30 Turning Points in the Making of American Cuisine.
Here are a few of the 30 food firsts:
Oliver Evans invents a fully automated grain mill in Delaware in 1784. Flour becomes the world's first processed food.
Cyrus McCormick, a Virginia farmer and inventor, patents the mechanical reaper, a horse-drawn device that harvests five times what a large crew can bring in by hand, in 1834. The reaper marks the first step toward the industrialization of agriculture in America.
Inventor and entrepreneur Gail Borden begins canning condensed milk in 1852. During the Civil War, the Union army issues a contract for Borden's product—the first ever for a canned food. Commercial canning is born.
Quaker Oats debuts its famous label in 1891, marking the advent of modern food branding.
In 1895 the first mass-produced packaged snack food arrives when Frederick and Louis Rueckheim, brothers from Chicago, start selling boxes of molasses-covered peanuts and popcorn, which they call Cracker Jack. Prizes don't show up in the boxes until 1912.
Upton Sinclair's The Jungle is published in 1906. The exposé of working conditions in the Chicago stockyards fails to strengthen workers' rights, but it does spur legislators to pass food-safety laws and prompts the eventual founding of the FDA.
The first full-service supermarket in the U.S., King Kullen, opens in Queens, New York, in 1930.
See all 30 at: http://www.saveur.com/article/Kitchen/30-Food-Firsts

The biggest star explosion yet seen may be the best known example of a rare type of star death that leaves no "body" behind, astronomers say. The unusual blast, dubbed SN 2007bi, appears to be a textbook example of a pair-instability supernova, a theoretical type of explosion proposed for very massive stars—those more than 140 times the mass of the sun. Although most supernovae leave behind black holes or dense stellar corpses called neutron stars, pair-instability explosions would be so intense that the whole star would be obliterated. Pair-instability supernovae have been hard to spot, however, because stars more than a hundred times the sun's mass are extremely rare.
"Anything that takes that long to rise and is that bright has to have a lot of mass," said study co-author Peter Nugent, an astrophysicist at the Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory in California. When these megastars exploded, the ancient, powerful outbursts scattered debris that might have sown the seeds for future stars. A pair-instability supernova "may be a one-in-a-trillion type of event," Nugent said, "but they may actually be very important" in understanding the evolution of the universe. Findings detailed in the December 3 issue of the journal Nature. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/12/091202-biggest-star-explosion-supernova.html

Kimchi is a well fermented spicy cabbage side dish served at every Korean meal. Whole chinese cabbages are stuffed with a mix of garlic, green onions, ginger and red pepper powder and fermented over a period of weeks. Kimchi has long been known for its health benefits and in 2007 was named by US Health Magazine as one of the top ten healthy foods in the world. It is also known to have anti-cancer properties due to its ingredients. To learn more about the healthy benefits of eating kimchi and Korean cuisine order your free copy of the ‘Wonderful World of Korean Food’.
Email: visitkorea@knto.org.au
http://english.visitkorea.or.kr/enu/OO/OO_EN_13_4_2.jsp?cid=753912
http://globalfoodie.com/2009/10/korea-kimchi-gimchi-koreas-national-dish/

How U.S. News rankings have changed law schools
A recent National Law Journal article, takes a look at a recent study put out by two sociology professors who reportedly interviewed more than 200 law school administrators, faculty members and prospective law students. The report, “Fear of Falling: The Effect of U.S. News & World Report Rankings on U.S. Law Schools,” was authored by Northwestern's Wendy Espeland and Iowa's Michael Sausder. It was recently released by the Law School Admission Council, which partially funded the research. WSJ Law Blog December 3, 2009

Fjord
A deep, steep-walled, U-shaped valley formed by glaciation, which has been flooded by seawater. Typically, waterfalls in this formation drop from hanging valleys. Fjords are commonly found in New Zealand, Canada, southern Argentina and Norway.
http://www.worldwaterfalldatabase.com/glossary.php

Fjell is a municipality in the county of Hordaland, Norway. The parish of Fjæld was established as a municipality on 1 January 1838 (see formannskapsdistrikt). It consists of several islands west of Bergen, the major ones being Litle-Sotra, Sotra (the northern part) Bjorøy and Turøy. The name is identical with the modern Norwegian word fjell or "mountain". The oldest form of the name was Undir Fjalli which means "under/below the mountain". Before 1918, the name was written Fjeld. http://wapedia.mobi/en/Fjell

The Way We Ate: The Great Scrapple Correspondence of 1872
http://dinersjournal.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/01/the-way-we-ate-the-great-scrapple-correspondence-of-1872/?scp=1&sq=scrapple&st=cse Scrapple is slices of ground pork, sage and cornmeal fried crispy brown. I’ve made it once from a recipe in The American Heritage Cookbook. Yes, we enjoyed it and will make it again.