Follow-up on the Alterran Legacy series:  Book 1, Colony Earth, won the gold prize in the science fiction/fantasy genre in the 2012 eLit Awards.  http://elitawards.com/2012_results.php  Book 2, Khamlok, was released in March and received excellent reviews from Kirkus and Clarion Foreword.  Congratulations to Toledo author, Regina Joseph!   

14 Marvelous Modern Libraries 

http://weburbanist.com/2011/08/26/reading-revolution-14-marvelous-modern-libraries/ 

Thanks, Barb. 

Pythagoras (ca. 569 BC-ca. 500-475 BC) is often referred to as the first pure mathematician. 
It is difficult to be certain whether all the theorems attributed to Pythagoras were originally his, or whether they came from the communal society of the Pythagoreans.  Some of the students of Pythagoras eventually wrote down the theories, teachings and discoveries of the group, but the Pythagoreans always gave credit to Pythagoras as the Master for: 

(1)  The sum of the angles of a triangle is equal to two right angles.

(2)  The theorem of Pythagoras - for a right-angled triangle the square on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides.  The Babylonians understood this 1000 years earlier, but Pythagoras proved it.
(3)  Constructing figures of a given area and geometrical algebra.  For example they solved various equations by geometrical means.
(4)  The discovery of irrational numbers is attributed to the Pythagoreans, but seems unlikely to have been the idea of Pythagoras because it does not align with his philosophy the all things are numbers, since number to him meant the ratio of two whole numbers.
(5)  The five regular solids (tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, icosahedron, dodecahedron).  It is believed that Pythagoras knew how to construct the first three but not last two.
(6)  Pythagoras taught that Earth was a sphere in the center of the Kosmos (Universe), that the planets, stars, and the universe were spherical because the sphere was the most perfect solid figure. He also taught that the paths of the planets were circular.  Pythagoras recognized that the morning star was the same as the evening star, Venus.
Pythagoras studied odd and even numbers, triangular numbers, and perfect numbers.  Pythagoreans contributed to our understanding of angles, triangles, areas, proportion, polygons, and polyhedra.  Pythagoras also related music to mathematics.  He had long played the seven string lyre, and learned how harmonious the vibrating strings sounded when the lengths of the strings were proportional to whole numbers, such as 2:1, 3:2, 4:3.  Pythagoreans also realized that this knowledge could be applied to other musical instruments.  http://www.mathopenref.com/pythagoras.html 

Marion Isaacs, author of the book The Kankakee River History, said:  "The Kankakee River has an ancient Indian portage on one end and an atomic power plant at the other.  Between these two points, it has a thousand strange tales."  Read about Deserters' Island and Bogus Island in Indiana at:  http://www.kankakeevalleyhistoricalsociety.org/schmal/bogus.htm 

WorldCat, the most comprehensive online database of resources available through libraries around the world, has reached another major milestone with the addition of its 2 billionth holding.  On Saturday, May 4, at 2:58 a.m. (MDT), the holding symbol for the University of Alberta Libraries, in Edmonton, was set through an automated process to the WorldCat record for the e-book, Evaluation of the City of Lakes Family Health Team Patient Portal Pilot Project: Final Report, published in 2012 by the Centre for Rural and Northern Health Research.  It was the 2 billionth holding set in WorldCat.  The e-book catalog record was created by the Canadian Electronic Book Library, an e-book provider in Canada, and was enhanced through OCLC’s automated authority control processing system.  http://visit.oclc.org/dm?id=A947A0844E7F25FF6D9ADEB4B6C9D28FBBBE1ADFE3D02CC7 

Would Ice Age man understand us?  It may depend on the words we choose.  Digging through languages in Eurasia for "fossil" words that have escaped erosion over time, researchers say they have identified an ancestral language that existed as far as 15,000 years ago.  This ancient language, described in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, may have given rise to several different language groups — including Indo-European, which boasts roughly 3 billion speakers and contains such far-flung languages as Spanish and Hindi.  They discovered a number of words — "this," "I," "give," "mother," "hand," "black," "ashes," "old," "man," "fire" — that cropped up in similar form across at least four of the seven language families studied across Eurasia.  They traced them back to 15,000 years — right around the time the glaciers would have been melting, allowing humans greater ability to spread out over the globe and for languages to start to diverge. 

Amina Khan  http://www.latimes.com/news/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-ice-age-language-ancestor-superfamily-eurasia-20130507,0,1515430.story

Shane Peacock (b. 1957), author of The Boy Sherlock Holmes series and many other books, plays, documentaries and articles for young readers and adults.  In the fall of 2007 Tundra Books published Peacock's YA novel “Eye of the Crow.”  Subtitled “The Boy Sherlock Holmes: His First Case,” it is the world’s first account of the childhood exploits of the most famous detective of all time.  It tells the tale of a gruesome murder committed in the spooky, dimly gas-lit East End of London, observed by no one … except two crows.  From this scrap of evidence, the brilliant boy solves the crime.  See Shane Peacock's bibliography, including the six titles in The Boy Sherlock Holmes series at:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shane_Peacock

Corvidae, songbird family, of the order Passeriformes, that includes crows, jays, and magpies.  Over 120 corvid species occur throughout the world; most are nonmigratory.  Corvids are strongly built, stout-billed birds 23–71 cm (9–28 inches) long, some being the largest passerines. They have plain, often glossy plumage that may be monochromatic or contrastingly patterned.  The sexes look alike.  Corvids have harsh, loud voices, and most are gregarious at times.  Social organization is highly developed, mutual aid being a strong feature. Individual birds may show exceptional intelligence.  The pair bond is strong, lifelong in some species.  Some corvids are notorious nest-robbers, and others damage grain crops; they also eat quantities of noxious insects, however, and are useful scavengers.  A few cold-country species store acorns and pine nuts for winter use; the caches they overlook are important in reforestation.  The larger, shorter-tailed species, of sombre appearance, occur worldwide except in South America.  See chough; crow; jackdaw; nutcracker; raven; rook.  The smaller, more colourful species, often long-tailed or crested, are most numerous in South America and southeastern Asia.  See  jay; magpie.  http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/139000/Corvidae

See statistics at the Internet Bird Collection:  http://ibc.lynxeds.com/family/crows-corvidae   

The 6th century BC Greek scribe Aesop featured corvids as intelligent antagonists in many fables.  Later, in western literature, popularized by American poet Edgar Allan Poe's work "The Raven", the Common Raven becomes a symbol of the main character's descent into madness.

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corvidae  Corvidae in literature  http://www.shades-of-night.com/aviary/birdfict.html