The American chestnut, Castanea dentate, was
once considered the redwood of the east. Chestnut trees grew to be very large with
trunks often greater than 5 feet in diameter and reaching heights of 100 feet. In states like Pennsylvania, it made up 25
percent of the forest. The American
chestnut was a major source of lumber and an important source of food for many
animals. It was also a favorite of many
people that loved to eat it roasted. The
chestnut rivaled the white oak as an important food source for animals with one
major difference: it could produce a
crop of nuts after eight years, while the oak often took over 20 years. A single chestnut tree could produce 10 or
more bushels of nuts. This important
tree for food and lumber was decimated by a fungal blight that was introduced
into the New York area on imported chestnut trees around 1904. The chestnut blight fungus, Cryphonectria parasitica, quickly spread across the eastern half
of the United States, killing more than three billion trees by the 1930s. The Midwest Nut Producers Council started trials of chestnut cultivars at Michigan State
University Extension’s Southwest
Michigan Research and Extension Center in Benton Harbor, Mich. By 1996, data from these trial plots suggested
that ‘Colossal,’ a European x Japanese hybrid provided large nuts and large
yields. Though the European chestnut is
susceptible to chestnut blight, it also produces four to five times more nuts
than the Chinese chestnuts. Growers in
Michigan have chosen to grow both the resistant Chinese chestnuts along with
the very productive, blight-susceptible European chestnuts. http://msue.anr.msu.edu/news/chestnuts_growing_a_food_crop_and_an_industry_in_michigan
Chestnut flour
is a grayish-tan alternative to regular all-purpose flour made from ground chestnuts. Its sweet flavor makes it a favorite
ingredient for recipes involving almonds, chocolate, honey, and
hazelnuts. A gluten-free product,
chestnut flour is a cooking option for people with celiac disease or other
gluten intolerances or allergies. Since
chestnuts do not contain the fat content regular nuts have, and are instead
largely composed of carbohydrates, they have many of the same properties as
flour. Known as the grain that grows on
trees, chestnuts have been dried and made into mellow, sweet flavored flour in
Italy for centuries. In Tuscany, where
it is known as Farina di Castagne, chestnut flour is considered a staple food,
and it is commonly called for in recipes.
http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-chestnut-flour.htm
Dead as a doornail is an ancient expression: we have a reference to this dating back to
1350, and it also appears in the fourteenth-century work The Vision of
Piers Plowman and in Shakespeare’s Henry IV. Another expression, of rather later date, is as
dead as a herring, because most people only saw herrings when they were
long dead and preserved; there are other similes with the same meaning, such as
dead as mutton, or dead as a stone. William and Mary Morris, in The Morris
Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins, quote a correspondent who points
out that it could come from a standard term in carpentry. If you hammer a nail through a piece of timber
and then flatten the end over on the inside so it can’t be removed again (a
technique called clinching), the nail is said to be dead, because
you can’t use it again. http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-dea1.htm
Figgy pudding--a.k.a. plum pudding, plum porridge,
Christmas pudding and steamed pudding-- is a quintessentially British sweet
with a history that might go back to Shakespeare's time. We know it was around in the mid-1600s,
because that's when the English Puritans banned it and Christmas, too. There probably aren't too many sweets that
have been banned, but then there aren't too many sweets that are as alcoholic
as this one.
Christmas Island is located in the Indian
Ocean, 380 kilometres south of Java and 2650 kilometres north west of Perth. The nearest point on the Australian mainland
is Northwest Cape, approximately 1565 kilometres to the south east. The Island has an area of 135 square
kilometres. http://www.regional.gov.au/territories/christmas/
The Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory’s
(PPPL) focus — magnetic fusion research — began at the university in 1951. It was grounded in the earlier work of a
European scientist then living in Princeton. Einstein’s
theory that mass could be converted into energy had been demonstrated six
years earlier near Alamogordo,
N.M., by fission — the splitting of atoms, which released the energy that
held the atoms together. By the 1950s,
however, attention was turning to an unimaginably more promising method of
releasing energy from transforming matter — the way the sun does, by fusion. Every second
the sun produces a million times more energy than the world consumes in a year.
But to “take a sun and put it in a box”
— the description of one scientist here — requires developing the new field of
plasma physics and solving the most difficult engineering problems in the
history of science. The objective is to
create conditions for the controlled release of huge amounts of energy from the
fusion of two hydrogen isotopes, deuterium
and tritium.
Hydrogen is the most abundant element in
the universe; Earth’s water contains a virtually inexhaustible supply (10
million million tons) of deuterium, and tritium is “bred” in the fusion plant
itself. The sun is a huge
sphere of plasma, which is a hot, electrically charged gas. The production and confinement of plasma in
laboratories is now routine. The task now is to solve the problem of “net
energy” — producing more electrical power than is required for the production
of it. Magnets produce a field
sufficient to prevent particles heated beyond the sun’s temperature — more than
100 million
degrees Celsius — from hitting the walls of the containment vessel. Understanding plasma’s behavior requires the
assistance of Titan, one of the
world’s fastest computers, which is located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in
Tennessee and can perform more
than 17 quadrillion — a million billion — calculations a second. As in today’s coal-fired
power plants, the ultimate object is heat — to turn
water into steam that drives generators. Fusion, however, produces no
greenhouse gases, no long-lived nuclear waste and no risk of the sort of
runaway reaction that occurred at Fukushima Geroge
F. Will http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-f-will-the-fusion-in-our-future/2013/12/20/73c28c2a-68d4-11e3-ae56-22de072140a2_story.html?hpid=z2
Dec. 20, 2013 Two
Canadian cities, Vancouver and Montreal, have the world’s best public
library systems, according to a new survey
by German researchers. Library
mavens at the Heinrich Heine University in Dusseldorf studied libraries in 31
major world cities, from London and Los Angeles, and from Shanghai to Sao
Paulo, Brazil. Two U.S. library systems
finished third and fourth: Chicago and San Francisco. The New York Public Library system (ranked 9th
overall), scored at the top in terms of digital services, while Montreal was
judged to have the best physical facilities and book collection. Hector Tobar
http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-et-jc-two-canadian-cities-have-worlds-best-public-libraries-survey-finds-20131220,0,1665035.story#axzz2o7yRS1Ig
Forget Peter and his peppers, and Sally and her
seashells. Researchers at MIT claim they have found the twistiest tongue
twister in the English language: "Pad
kid poured curd pulled cod."
Presenting the work at the Acoustical Society of America
in San Francisco in December 2013, Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel, an
MIT psychologist who helped coin the phrase, says it's so tricky that when she
asked subjects to say it ten times fast, some became so tongue-tied that they
simply gave up. This puts it in the
league of famously frustrating phrases like "Clean clams crammed in clean
cans"; "The top cop saw a cop top"; and "The seething sea
ceaseth and thus the seething sea sufficeth us." So what makes some phrases harder to say than
others? Researchers say tongue twisters
share certain qualities that the human brain and mouth tend to reject. For example, they often contain a quick string
of similar but distinct phonemes, which are the smallest linguistic unit (like
"s" or "sh"). Inversions, such as "the top cop saw a cop top,"
also prove tricky. And "Pad kid
poured curd pulled cod" has the extra bonus of being totally nonsensical. Researchers have also identified the kinds of
mistakes people tend to make when attempting these phrases. They often conflate consonants, a mistake
linguists refer to as double onsets. "Top
cop" sometimes becomes "tkop," for example. People also tend to turn vowels into mush. "Toy boat" very quickly becomes
"tuh-boyt." Is the brain
jumbling the syllables, or are the muscles in our mouths unable to handle
certain rapid movements? In 1982,
researchers Ralph and Lyn Haber examined where the mistakes occur. Asking college-age test subjects to silently
read two types of sentences — ones that contained tongue twisters, and ones
that were similar in complexity, but did not contain tongue twisters — the
Habers found that subjects slowed down on sentences with tongue twisters, even
when their actual tongues were not in use. This implied that the brain is confusing the
sounds before they ever reach the mouth.
Carmel Lobello http://theweek.com/article/index/253872/this-is-the-twistiest-tongue-twister-ever-says-science
Here are three stories
from three great writers of the 20th century that will put the holidays in a
new light.
(1) The first is John Cheever’s wonderfully funny
1949 story, “Christmas is a Sad Season for the Poor,” originally published in
The New Yorker http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1949/12/24/1949_12_24_017_TNY_CARDS_000222088?currentPage=all
Cheever’s protagonist, Charlie, is
an elevator operator for a Park Avenue apartment building. He isn’t happy about having to work on
Christmas, and he voices his complaint to the very first apartment dweller who
enters his elevator. The doorman repeats
his complaint — and throws in a lie or two — to other people in the building,
and soon he’s being surprised with a windfall of food and gifts.
(2) In Truman Capote's “A Christmas Memory," http://faculty.weber.edu/jyoung/English%206710/A%20Christmas%20Memory.pdf
he recounts a tale of the Christmas
he was 7 years old and living with his mother’s eccentric relatives in Alabama.
The story is centered on one relative he
was especially close to, and who conspired with him to make the most Christmasy
food she could think of: fruitcake (the recipe requires whiskey, which wasn't
available legally). (3) If you’re looking for a "white" Christmas, then look no further than the poet Dylan Thomas’ "A Child's Christmas in Wales." http://www.bfsmedia.com/MAS/Dylan/Christmas.html a reminiscence of his childhood. Originally read by Thomas for a radio show in 1952, the story cemented Thomas's fame in the U.S. Hector Tobar http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-et-jc-three-alternative-christmas-tales-from-literary-greats-20131224,0,4787578.story#axzz2oVBeQSYy
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