Ball's Pyramid is an erosional remnant of a shield volcano and caldera that formed about 7 million years ago. Ball's Pyramid is 20 kilometres (12 mi) southeast of Lord Howe Island in the Pacific Ocean. It is 562 metres (1,844 ft) high, while measuring only 1,100 metres (3,600 ft) in length and 300 metres (980 ft) across, making it the tallest volcanic stack in the world. Ball's Pyramid is part of the Lord Howe Island Marine Park. Ball's Pyramid has a few satellite islets. Observatory Rock and Wheatsheaf Islet lie about 800 metres (2,600 ft) west-northwest and west-southwest respectively, of the western extremity of Ball's Pyramid. Southeast Rock is a pinnacle located about 3.5 kilometres (2.2 mi) southeast of Ball's Pyramid. Like Lord Howe Island and the Lord Howe seamount chain, Ball's Pyramid is based on the Lord Howe Rise, part of the submerged continent of Zealandia. In 2001, a team of entomologists and conservationists landed on Ball's Pyramid to chart its flora and fauna. To their surprise they rediscovered a population of the Lord Howe Island stick insect (Dryococelus australis) living in an area of 6 by 30 metres (20 by 98 ft), at a height of 100 metres (330 ft) above the shoreline, under a single Melaleuca howeana shrub. The bush was growing in a small crevice where water was seeping through cracks in the underlying rocks. This moisture supported relatively lush plant growth which had, over time, resulted in a build up of plant debris, several metres deep. The population was extremely small, only 24 individuals. Two pairs were brought to two Pacific zoos to breed new populations. On the unsuccessful 1964 climb, Dave Roots had brought back a photograph of the insect, which the Australian Museum told him they thought was extinct. See image of Ball's Pyramid at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball's_Pyramid
See image of Dryococelus australis, commonly known as the Lord Howe Island stick insect or tree lobster at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dryococelus_australis

The original Electoral College plan worked successfully for the two times that George Washington was elected president. However, a major flaw became apparent after the election of 1796. According to the Constitution each elector cast only one ballot with two names on it. John Adams, a Federalist, received the largest number of votes. Thomas Jefferson, the Democratic Republican, lost to Adams by three votes and became vice-president. The framers were not in favor of political parties and had made no mention of them in the Constitution. Yet here were a president and vice-president from different parties, and Adams and Jefferson were strongly opposed on many major issues including states' rights, the power and size of the national government, and tariffs. The outcome of the election of 1796 would influence the way electors would be chosen as well as how they would vote in future elections. In the election of 1800 John Adams, the incumbent, again faced Thomas Jefferson. This time the Democratic Republican electors were urged to vote the party ticket, that is, Thomas Jefferson for president and Aaron Burr for vice-president. Seventy-three electors did just that, resulting in a tie for president between Jefferson and Burr. Under the Constitution, the vote moved to the House where Federalists desiring to embarrass Jefferson voted for Burr, forcing the ballot 35 times over six days. Finally, Alexander Hamilton reluctantly supported Jefferson and the tie was broken. The election of 1800 had several lasting effects on the Electoral College system. It was the first time that a two-candidate ticket was promoted by a party, as well as the beginning of the practice of nominating electors who pledged to automatically vote the party ticket. This new development was directly opposed to the framers' original version of the electors as "free agents'" or informed, respectable, independent citizens from each state. By 1804, the 12th Amendment was passed, making up for the weakness in the original Clause 3. Never again would such a tie be possible, as separate ballots would now be cast for president and vice-president. http://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/electoral-tally/

John Quincy Adams once wrote, "Could I have chosen my own genius and condition, I would have made myself a great poet." Although literary fame would escape the sixth president of the United States, throughout his life Adams was a serious reader and writer of poetry. Adams's poetic efforts included secular verse, hymns, and versifications of the Psalms. He also translated poems into English, including Christoph Martin Wieland's fairy-tale epic Oberon (the translation went unpublished until 1940). http://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/prespoetry/jqa.html

Presidents as Poets: Poetry Written by United States Presidents Created by Peter Armenti, Digital Reference Specialist Link to selected presidents and to poetry guides such as official state poems, state poet laureates and U.S. poet laureates at: http://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/prespoetry/index.html

New research examining the frequency of words used in books over more than 200 years reveals the rise and demise of various words through time and how social, technological and political change influence language. An international team of scientists investigated word histories using Google’s Ngram project, a database of words in seven languages developed from scanning and digitizing about 4 percent of the world’s texts. The researchers mined books printed in English, Spanish and Hebrew published between 1800 and 2008, a corpus of more than 10 million words. There’s a marked increase in the death rate of words that coincides with the modern print era, the researchers found. That trend intensified with the advent of stricter publishing procedures, and later computerized editing and spell-checking technologies, which led to the extinction of various misspelled words or less-popular synonyms. Incorrect or nonstandard spellings weren’t the only cause of word death. Roentgenogram — which comes from Wilhelm Röntgen, who discovered X-rays — faced competition from radiogram and X-ray, which ultimately triumphed, Joel Tenenbaum reported February 28 at a meeting of the American Physical Society. http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/338884/title/Modern_era_brings_death_to_words

The Electoral Commission was a temporary body created by Congress to resolve the disputed United States presidential election of 1876. It consisted of 15 members. The election was contested by the Democratic ticket, Samuel J. Tilden and Thomas A. Hendricks, and the Republican ticket, Rutherford B. Hayes and William A. Wheeler. Twenty electoral votes, from the states of Florida, Louisiana, Oregon, and South Carolina, were in dispute; the resolution of these disputes would determine the outcome of the election. Facing a constitutional crisis the likes of which the nation had never seen, Congress passed a law forming the Electoral Commission to settle the result. Tilden had won the popular vote by almost a quarter of a million votes, but he did not have a clear Electoral College majority. He received 184 uncontested electoral votes, while Hayes received 165, with both sides claiming the remaining twenty (4 from Florida, 8 from Louisiana, 7 from South Carolina, and 1 from Oregon). A total of 185 votes constituted an Electoral College majority; hence, Tilden needed only one of the disputed votes, while Hayes needed all twenty. The Commission consisted of fifteen members: five representatives, five senators, and five Supreme Court justices. Eight members were Republicans; seven were Democrats. The Commission ultimately voted along party lines to award all twenty disputed votes to Hayes, thus assuring his victory in the Electoral College by a margin of 185-184. To prevent a repetition of the 1876 debacle, Congress passed the Electoral Count Act in 1887. Under this law, 3 U.S.C. § 5, a state's determination of electoral disputes is conclusive in most circumstances. The President of the Senate opens the electoral certificates in the presence of both houses, and hand them to the tellers, two from each house, who are to read them aloud and record the votes. If the same state sends multiple returns to Congress, then whichever return has been certified by the executive of the state is counted, unless both houses of Congress decide otherwise. The interpretation of this act was the subject of controversy in Bush v. Gore, a case relating to the disputed presidential election of 2000. Read details at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_Commission_(United_States)

The latest linguistic curiosity to emerge from the petri dish of girl culture gained a burst of public recognition in December, when researchers from Long Island University published a paper http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0892199711000701 about it in The Journal of Voice. Working with what they acknowledged was a very small sample — recorded speech from 34 women ages 18 to 25 — the professors said they had found evidence of a new trend among female college students: a guttural fluttering of the vocal cords they called “vocal fry.” A classic example of vocal fry, best described as a raspy or croaking sound injected (usually) at the end of a sentence, can be heard when Mae West says, “Why don’t you come up sometime and see me,” or, more recently on television, when Maya Rudolph mimics Maya Angelou on “Saturday Night Live.” “If women do something like uptalk or vocal fry, it’s immediately interpreted as insecure, emotional or even stupid,” said Carmen Fought, a professor of linguistics at Pitzer College in Claremont, Calif. “The truth is this: Young women take linguistic features and use them as power tools for building relationships.” The idea that young women serve as incubators of vocal trends for the culture at large has longstanding roots in linguistics. The use of “like” in a sentence, “apparently without meaning or syntactic function, but possibly as emphasis,” has made its way into the Webster’s New World College Dictionary, Fourth Edition — this newspaper’s reference Bible — where the example given is: “It’s, like, hot.” “Like” and uptalk often go hand in hand. Several studies have shown that uptalk can be used for any number of purposes, even to dominate a listener. Vocal fry, also known as creaky voice, has a long history with English speakers. Dr. Crystal, the British linguist, cited it as far back as 1964 as a way for British men to denote their superior social standing. Douglas Quenqua http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/28/science/young-women-often-trendsetters-in-vocal-patterns.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all