Wednesday, February 12, 2014

Christopher Latham Sholes (February 14, 1819–February 17, 1890) was an American inventor who invented the first practical typewriter and the QWERTY keyboard still in use today.  He was also a newspaper publisher and Wisconsin politician.  Typewriters had been invented as early as 1714 by Henry Mill and reinvented in various forms throughout the 1800s.  It was to be Sholes, however, who invented the first one to be commercially successful.  Sholes had moved to Milwaukee and became the editor of a newspaper.  Following a strike by compositors at his printing press, he tried building a machine for typesetting, but this was a  failure and he quickly abandoned the idea.  He arrived at the typewriter through a different route. His initial goal was to create a machine to number pages of a book, tickets, and so on.  He began work on this at Kleinsteubers machine shop in Milwaukee, together with a fellow printer Samuel W. Soule, and they patented a numbering machine on November 13, 1866.  Sholes and Soule showed their machine to Carlos Glidden, a lawyer and amateur inventor at the machine shop working on a mechanical plow, who wondered if the machine could not be made to produce letters and words as well.  Further inspiration came in July 1867, when Sholes came across a short note in Scientific American describing the "Pterotype", a prototype typewriter that had been invented by John Pratt.  From the description, Sholes decided that the Pterotype was too complex and set out to make his own machine, whose name he got from the article:  the typewriting machine, or typewriter.  For this project, Soule was again enlisted, and Glidden joined them as a third partner who provided the funds.  The Scientific American article (unillustrated) had figuratively used the phrase "literary piano"; the first model that the trio built had a keyboard literally resembling a piano.  It had black keys and white keys, laid out in two rows.  It did not contain keys for the numerals 0 or 1 because the letters O and I were deemed sufficient.  The first row was made of ivory and the second of ebony, the rest of the framework was wooden.

At one time in America, there was a distinction between short sauce and long sauce.  The Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) contains a 1859 quote that details this distinction, with short sauce as radishes, potatoes, turnips, onions, and pumpkins and long sauce as beets, carrots, and parsnips.  And we find info about this long/short sauce distinction mentioned in theOxford English Dictionary (OED) as well.  But, DARE also has a quote from 1825 that also names round sauce (or “sarse”) as an option.  Round sauce remained undefined, though DARE does have an entry for round squash, also called round sauce squash, round white squash, orwhite round squash, all of which refer to summer squash (and especially pattypan squash.  Garden truck is an American term for “garden vegetables”.  These are not, in case you were wondering, vegetables grown in the bed of a pickup (which I have seen).  The use of truck here is much older, harkening back to its original sense as a verb meaning “to give in exchange for”.  Following from the verb, truck the noun comes to mean the “action or practice of trucking; trading by exchange of commodities” and then comes to denote the things being traded.  This is why we can (still) run across a saying such as to have no truck with someone to mean that you “don’t want to have anything to do with them” (a saying that’s been around since at least 1625).  http://homewords99.wordpress.com/2012/05/26/vegetables/  Homewords is a blog about words, history and culture written by Allison Burkette

January 31, 2014  "Librarians have suffered enough", according to Lemony Snicket, who is setting up a new annual US prize "honouring a librarian who has faced adversity with integrity and dignity intact".  Snicket, the pen name of American author Daniel Handler, is the chronicler of the "travails" of orphans Violet, Klaus and Sonny in the multi-million-selling A Series of Unfortunate Events books.  He is, he said in his announcement, often "falsely accused of crimes and sought by his enemies as well as the police", and he believes that, "in much the same spirit, librarians have suffered enough" and thus deserve to be rewarded.  Together with the American Library Association, he is therefore setting up a new $3,000 (£1,800) award, The Lemony Snicket Prize for Noble Librarians Faced With Adversity.  "The Snicket prize will remind readers everywhere of the joyous importance of librarians and the trouble that is all too frequently unleashed upon them," said Snicket, who is funding the prize from his own "disreputable gains".  One way in which librarians have been challenged in the US over the last year is through attempts to ban books:  late in 2013, the Kids' Right to Read Project reported 49 censorship attempts in 29 states, a 53% increase in activity on 2012.  One incident involved a vote to ban Stephen Chbosky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower from middle-school classroom libraries.  With support from Judy Blume, and two months of negotiations, the book was reinstated.  In 2006, the Katy Intermediate School District in Texas placed Snicket's books in "restricted use" – meaning children were not allowed to check out any of his work from school libraries. Snicket's books, which have won numerous children's awards and been nominated for such prizes as the Children's Choice and Nickelodeon Kids' Choice awards, was restricted on grounds of excessive "violence and horror".  Snicket's new Noble Librarians prize will be judged by members of the American Library Association, including at least one member from its Intellectual Freedom Committee.  Candidates – who must describe an "adverse incident" they faced and "their response, result and resources utilised" – need to be nominated by 1 May this year.  Alison Flood  http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jan/31/lemony-snicket-prize-librarians-book-bans

Feb. 7, 2014  Mamoru Samuragochi’s original claim to fame lay in composing video game soundtracks.  The recording of his first symphony, subtitled “Hiroshima” and lasting well over an hour, sold more than 100,000 copies in Japan after its 2011 premiere.  He was said to be deaf.  This week, his professional identity was exploded when a music teacher named Takashi Niigaki revealed that for the past 18 years he had in fact been writing Samuragochi’s putative works.  And by the way, Samuragochi wasn’t deaf at all.  Samuragochi’s CDs are being pulled from the shelves of Japanese record stores; his publisher is ceasing printing his scores.  The issue even touches the Olympic Games; Daisuke Takahashi, the men’s ice skating bronze medalist in 2010, is skating his short program to music that was supposed to be by Samuragochi.  He has often been asked over the last couple of days whether he will change his program.  Fraud, and plagiarism, and copyright violation, and intellectual property rights, represent a conglomerate of hot-button topics in the digital universe.  Artistic fraud, of course, is not a phenomenon of the digital age; far from it.  Forgeries have been a staple and scourge of the visual-arts world throughout art history, from Han van Meegeren’s Vermeers to Courbet’s imitators back to the time when Michelangelo allegedly made a statue of Cupid and buried it to artificially age it so it would look like an actual Roman or Greek artifact, which would mean he could sell it for more money.  The trope of a man asking someone else to write music in his name is not new, either.  A famous predecessor of Samuragochi is Franz von Walsegg, an Austrian nobleman who used to commission works from composers and pass them off as his own (Mozart’s final Requiem being the most famous example).  Between these examples lies a key difference that gets obscured in the dust-cloud of cries of “fraud” and “cheating” and “inauthenticity” that has risen up around the story, as it always rises up when such topics come up today.  It’s one thing to paint or write or compose something and pass it off as the work of an established, famous artist, like the fake Jackson Pollocks the Knoedler gallery sold to well-heeled buyers. That’s fraud.  It’s another thing to create a work of art that is destined to enter the world under false premises, like the Mozart Requiem.  There’s a qualitative difference.  One is real art under an assumed name.  And one is a counterfeit.  You can debate this point; you can say that some forgeries are better than others, or that forgeries represent a valid artistic statement of their own.  The fact remains that Van Meegeren’s counterfeit “Vermeers” make us chuckle today, while Mozart’s Requiem moves us profoundly, and von Walsegg’s name is nearly forgotten.  Anne Midgette 

Feedback to the Great Molasses Flood  There was an interesting article in Scientific American recently that referred to the Great Molasses Flood.  The people were killed mostly because molasses is so viscous (compared, for example, to water) that they could not move in it and were trapped below the surface.   I remember from my engineering background that the Reynolds number is the ratio of the inertial forces to the viscous forces.  Protozoa and such critters have a Reynolds number in water similar to the Reynolds number of humans in molasses, and it was an interesting article on what techniques microscopic creatures use to be able to move through water.  Thanks, David

Reynolds number explained by NASA  http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/BGH/reynolds.html

Shirley Temple Black (April 23, 1928-February 10, 2014) made her first movie appearances in “Baby Burlesks,” a series of one-reel shorts that parodied movies and movie stars of the day.  In her autobiography, “Child Star,” Mrs. Black wrote that she once asked for an accounting of her investments. She said she discovered that, of more than $3 million she had made since childhood, only $44,000 remained in her name.  Half her earnings had gone to her parents and much of the rest paid the living expenses of other family members and a dozen household workers, she said.  Her father had ignored a court order and had failed to deposit money in her trust account.  She became interested in world affairs and turned down acting offers, until her return in “Shirley Temple's Storybook” on NBC-TV in 1958.  Ms. Temple Black’s last foray into television was in January 1965, when she shot a situation comedy pilot, “Go Fight City Hall,” in which she played a social worker.  It was made on the 20th Century-Fox lot.  Her first day on the set, there was a banner and party in the commissary.  “If there had not been a Shirley Temple, there would not be a 20th Century-Fox,” a spokesman said.  Claudia Levy  See much more plus list of her films from 1932-1949 at http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/shirley-temple-black-actress-and-diplomat-dies-at-85/2014/02/11/03b99f88-930c-11e3-83b9-1f024193bb84_story.html?hpid=z1


Issue 1109  February 12, 2014  On this date in 1914, the first stone of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. was put in place.  

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