Major websites such as MSN.com and Hulu.com have been tracking people's online activities using powerful new methods that are almost impossible for computer users to detect, new research shows. The new techniques, which are legal, reach beyond the traditional "cookie," a small file that websites routinely install on users' computers to help track their activities online. Hulu and MSN were installing files known as "supercookies," which are capable of re-creating users' profiles after people deleted regular cookies, according to researchers at Stanford University and University of California at Berkeley. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903480904576508382675931492.html

Vizier Abdul Kasem Ismail was a Persian bibliophile who traveled with forty camels carrying 117,000 books in alphabetical order. http://www.tundrabooks.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780887766985

The Great Wall of China is not a continuous wall but is a collection of short walls that often follow the crest of hills on the southern edge of the Mongolian plain. The Great Wall of China, known as "long Wall of 10,000 Li" in China, extends about 8,850 kilometers (5,500 miles). A first set of walls, designed to keep Mongol nomads out of China, were built of earth and stones in wood frames during the Qin Dynasty (221-206 BCE). Many are familiar with the claim that the Great Wall of China is the only man-made object visible from space or from the moon with the naked eye. This is simply not true. The myth of being able to see the Great Wall from space originated in Richard Halliburton's 1938 (long before humans saw the earth from space) book Second Book of Marvels said that the Great Wall of China is the only man-made object visible from the moon. From a low orbit of the earth, many artificial objects are visible on the earth, such as highways, ships in the sea, railroads, cities, fields of crops, and even some individual buildings. While at a low orbit, the Great Wall of China can certainly be seen from space but it is not unique in that regard. http://geography.about.com/od/specificplacesofinterest/a/greatwall.htm

John Van Etten, former grounds superintendent at the Mohonk Mountain House in upstate New York, recommends 15 plants that deer won't eat; your experience, of course, may differ. For a list of deer-resistant plants in your area, contact your local extension agent. Click on images of the 15 plants and learn about them at: http://www.finegardening.com/plants/articles/15-deer-resistant_plants.aspx
Thanks, Karen.

Punctuation marks are symbols that indicate the structure and organization of written language, as well as intonation and pauses to be observed when reading aloud. In written English, punctuation is vital to disambiguate the meaning of sentences. For example, "woman, without her man, is nothing" and "woman: without her, man is nothing" have greatly different meanings, as do "eats shoots and leaves" and "eats, shoots and leaves". The first writing systems were mostly logographic and/or syllabic, for example Chinese and Maya script, and they do not necessarily require punctuation, especially spacing. This is because the entire morpheme or word is typically clustered within a single glyph, so spacing does not help as much to distinguish where one word ends and the other starts. Disambiguation and emphasis can easily be communicated without punctuation by employing a separate written form distinct from the spoken form of the language that uses slightly different phraseology. The earliest alphabetic writing had no capitalization, no spaces and few punctuation marks. The oldest known document using punctuation is the Mesha Stele (9th century BC). This employs points between the words and horizontal strokes between the sense section as punctuation.

The Greeks were using punctuation marks consisting of vertically arranged dots - usually two (cf. the modern colon) or three - in around the 5th century BC. Greek playwrights such as Euripides and Aristophanes used symbols to distinguish the ends of phrases in written drama: this essentially helped the play's cast to know when to pause. In particular, they used three different symbols to divide speeches, known as commas (indicated by a centred dot), colons (indicated by a dot on the base line), and periods or full stops (indicated by a raised dot). The Romans (circa 1st century BC) also adopted symbols to indicate pauses. With the invention of moveable type in Europe began an increase of printed material. "The rise of printing in the 14th and 15th centuries meant that a standard system of punctuation was urgently required." The introduction of a standard system of punctuation has also been attributed to Aldus Manutius and his grandson. They have been credited with popularizing the practice of ending sentences with the colon or full stop, inventing the semicolon, making occasional use of parentheses and creating the modern comma by lowering the virgule. According to the 1885 edition of The American Printer, the importance of punctuation was noted in various sayings by children such as:
Charles the First walked and talked
Half an hour after his head was cut off.
With a semi-colon and a comma added it reads:
Charles the First walked and talked;
Half an hour after, his head was cut off.
See a table with punctuation marks, including word dividers, general typography and related marks at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuation

After learning of an "unwritten rule" that watches are best photographed at 10:10, I checked the Wall Street Journal on August 18, and yes, the four watches pictured were all set at 10:10.

For the third time this summer, a giant wall of dust swept over Phoenix and parts of central Arizona, turning the sky brown, delaying flights, and knocking out power to thousands. National Weather Service meteorologists said a thunderstorm packing winds of up to 60 mph pushed the dust storm toward the Phoenix area about 6 p.m. local time (9 p.m. ET) August 18. Weather officials say such massive dust storms, also known as haboobs in Arabic, only happen in Arizona, Africa's Sahara desert and parts of the Middle East because of dry conditions and large amounts of sand. The billowing wall of dust cut visibility to a few hundred yards. http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/44200582/ns/weather/

Website of the Day Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum www.nasm.si.edu
Number to Know 1939: Year when National Aviation Day was created. Today is the event, a day that was picked because it’s Orville Wright’s birthday.
This Day in History Aug. 19, 1812: War of 1812: American frigate USS Constitution defeats the British frigate HMS Guerriere off the coast of Nova Scotia, Canada, earning her nickname "Old Ironsides."
Daily Quote “If we all worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true is really true, there would be little hope of advance.” - Orville Wright http://www.hillsdale.net/newsnow/x643155390/Morning-Minutes-Aug-19